Russell and Whitehead Solved the Problem

I was struck by Carey R. Carlson’s opening lines in the preface to his book, The Mind-Body Problem and Its Solution:

“The mind-body problem demands a description of how the mental and physical parts of the world go together to make up the whole. The problem was solved around 1927 by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead.”

(1927 saw the publication of Russell’s Analysis of Matter, and was the year of Whitehead’s Gifford lectures which formed the basis of his Process and Reality.)

Since I think the Russellian stance on the mind-body problem is superior to the traditional options of dualism and materialism and also think Whitehead’s speculative process metaphysics was far ahead of its time, I was excited to see this passage and curious as to how well Carlson would back it up over the course of a short book. After reading the book I can say I think he did an excellent job in showing how the ideas from these thinkers can be put together into a compelling argument for a more coherent view of the world: that of a causal network of events which share a character which naturally underpins what we characterize as the mental and physical.

Carlson is an independent thinker and writer from Minneapolis who studied philosophy some years ago and concluded Russell and Whitehead had it right. He says he was perplexed that this seemed unappreciated. While he ended up pursuing a career outside philosophy, he finally was able to put together his views on the matter on paper (he put out this book in 2004). He and I corresponded via e-mail recently and that led to my interest in reading his work.

Both Russell and Whitehead explained why you cannot identify the world with our mathematical descriptions of it: you leave out the intrinsic qualitative character of the world we know via experience. Both philosophers showed, in somewhat different ways, that what we think of as mental events and physical events can both fit into a picture of a causal network, whereas our usual intuition of the world as a spatial container holding static objects or substance won’t work – whether one posits one kind of object or two.

Carlson’s outstanding contribution is to carefully describe what this ontology of causal relations can do: it can describe space-time and all that’s in it while also accommodating mental events. He then shows how scientific theory really is an elucidation of a causal web and how it must actually fit into our network of experiences in order to be formulated. This leads to the final postulate that all nature has a sentient character, and that this best explains how mind and world are unified. While I was already sold on this idea, I think Carlson’s book may convince other readers of the merits of a panexperientialist solution to the mind-body problem inspired by sound philosophy of science.

All in all, this book does credit to its ambitious title. Along the way, it is also a fine exposition of some of the work of two of our greatest twentieth century thinkers.

My chapter-by-chapter notes and comments follow below.

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In the first chapter, he lays out the problem. Like others, he locates the “hard” problem for materialism in the raw feeling of being or sentience. He speaks of “the sensorium” of unified experience. If materialism or physicalism sees the mathematically characterized world as all that exists, then it does not include nor will it explain sentience – that which is given in phenomenal experience. The mind-body problem could be called the “phenomenology-physics problem”, he says (p.13).

Chapter 2 deepens this discussion, taking a closer look at the history of physics. Even with the advent of modern physics, taking quantum field theory for example, there seems to be a left-over tendency to conceive the world as physical matter or energy existing in a container of physical space. There certainly is no role for mental features in such a worldview.

After touching very briefly on some historical philosophical perspectives in Chapter 3, we start to move toward the solution in Chapter 4 with a review of Russell’s analysis of the world in terms of structure and relations (and specifically causal structure and relations). Here, Carlson pulls relevant passages from Russell’s Human Knowledge (this book I had not read – I had read the Analysis of Matter). Structure is defined as a pattern of relations. Relations relate terms of a class (which is just any definite set of entities). Russell discusses a variety of types of relations: dyadic and higher-order, symmetric/asymmetric, transitive/intransitive. Relata, relations and structure together form a complex, which is a whole or a fact. This approach can be seen as applying to pure mathematics, and it can also be seen as characterizing the phenomena of the world, as presented to us. In physics, we apply mathematics to real world phenomena. But one can’t identify the phenomena as identical with the mathematical description. Here’s a quote from Russell: “There is, however, a very definite limit to the process of turning physics into logic and mathematics; it is set by the fact that physics is an empirical science, depending for its credibility upon relations to our perceptive experiences.”

While Russell’s philosophy of science is obviously not unknown, commentators I have read don’t always stress the role of relations in his analysis. The fact that the world is made of relations (rather than the static objects or “stuff” of our intuitions) is a key point for Carlson, which will also provide the link to the work of Whitehead (Carlson notes with interest the history here: while Russell and Whitehead were famous for their collaboration on the Principia Mathematica, that seemed to be the end of their formal work together – yet the “fingerprints” of this shared history writing the Principia can be seen in their similar later critiques of the role of logic and mathematics in science).

In Chapter 5, Carlson argues that the most basic feature of physics, space-time, can be analyzed in terms of causal structure. Here he gives credit to the role the theory of special relativity played in showing the way forward: in it we can see how causal relations could be responsible for both spatial and temporal order. Since causal relations are relations in time, it is the temporal ordering of events which is fundamental, while the spatial is derived.

Since “real” causation is an asymmetric relation, Carlson shows how we can use arrows to graphically illustrate causal relations. One can see how “space-like” and “time-like” relations between events arise from a causal structure. He then shows how a “particle” could be defined as a recurring pattern of activity -- a certain geometric pattern repeated along a time-like route in a larger causal lattice). One of Carlson’s interesting ideas is that since different numbers of arrows could connect two given events, one gets a notion of relative temporal frequency. This allows for the introduction of the concept of energy into a causal network of events.

With these examples, we can see how the notion of the physical world (traditionally seen as a spatial container plus stuff inside it) can be replaced by a network of time-like causal relations alone. This is consistent with a basic notion of what science does: it looks at the world and analyzes what comes before what. Carlson notes that progress in physics eventually arrived at quantum events – discrete events which “do not admit of further before-and-after analysis” (p.71). These elementary events and the causal connections among them constitute the world. So the physical world is not space plus what it contains, but rather time-like causal relations only. And this picture is one which allows for the solution to the mind-body problem.

In Chapter 6, Carlson argues that mental events can be located in the causal network in the same way as “physical” events. Our experience can be seen as participation in a sequence of time-ordered mental events. So, do mental and physical events “interact”? Interactionist dualism is often seen as an incoherent perspective on the mind-body problem. But we’re not talking about static substances. Russell reminds us that mental events are unavoidably part of the causal network which describes the world, since the structure of physics has to empirically connect to the sensations of the physicist. Mental and physical events are interspersed in the causal network. Now, our human experiences seem very different than the entities of micro-physics, but when you break down it all down, both can be situated in a causal network. “The distinction between mental and physical now hinges upon the assumption that mental events are characterized by sensory qualities, while physical events are not. (p.87)”

Carlson does a good job in this chapter in trying to break down our intuitions, and it’s hard to do it justice in this summary. But I think he does a good job showing how an event ontology can situate the mental as well as the physical in one world-web. Some questions arise here: what are the base-level indivisible quantum events connected by the arrows of causal relations, such that they can form the basis for everything? What is the quantum event’s intrinsic nature?

Heading toward an answer to this is the discussion in Chapter 7. While in Chapter 6 Carlson tries to show how mental events can be situated in a world we think of as physical, in Chapter 7 he (again leveraging Russell) shows that we really do need to invert this. All physical theorizing and experimentation does take place within the context of mental events. This shows there really is no reason to distinguish between the two kinds of events. Science gives us nothing but causal structure. We know some causal events have a mental character and the physical events are only known via the mental.

Russell “stops” at this point. He was agnostic about whether the intrinsic character of the physical (non-directly experienced) events was also of mental or sentient character in any way. He said we just don’t know. Phenomenal character is the only kind of intrinsic quality we’re familiar with, but we can’t know the intrinsic character of the rest. Given this stance, some have cast Russell’s theory as a form of neutral monism.

But Carlson wants to go further, so he states that his final chapter (no.8) “belongs to Whitehead”. Whitehead’s critique of materialism was very similar to Russell’s (for example the first several chapters in his Science and the Modern World). But in Process and Reality, he was much more ambitious. Among other things in that work, he goes ahead and postulates that all events have a sentient character. Carlson endorses the idea that it is both fitting and simpler to posit this, rather than to assume there is some other unknown form of intrinsic content. Further, under this assumption, the world just makes more sense in terms of unifying the human experience with the rest of the world. In Whitehead’s theory, the causal structure of all events are grounded and ordered in the same way.

Carlson does a good job in just a few pages in summarizing some of Whitehead’s ideas. This is difficult because of all of Whitehead’s invented terminology and his hard-to-penetrate prose “style”. Whitehead’s treatment of causation is richer than what Carlson has discussed so far, including the transition from subjective to objective poles for each event, and the inclusion of purpose and self-determination as a causal factor in the setting the course of events. He also discusses Whitehead’s treatment of the unactualized possibilities (eternal objects) which are presupposed by the view that the temporal process establishes the contingent facts of the world. He finally then discusses Whitehead’s theory of how events (occasions) are organized into enduring societies and how the parts work to satisfy the determination of the whole -- a template for describing the human mind.

I don’t have very much critical to say about the book except as it relates to my thinking about what might be added to expand the discussion. Events and causation are the primitives in the theory. Until the final chapter on Whitehead, how causation works is not described. We can probably improve on Whitehead in this area (Gregg Rosenberg’s theory would be one to possibly consider). Related to this would be drawing more connections to an interpretation of quantum mechanics to better describe what is going on in an elementary quantum event and what the status is of wavefunction associated with a quantum system. Also, we need to someday improve on Whitehead with regard to the combination or composition problem – explaining how micro-events clump up into macro-events like the ones making up human experience.

Cephalopod Consciousness Update

An article entitled “Cephalopod consciousness: Behavioral evidence” by Jennifer A. Mather has appeared in the latest issue of the journal Consciousness and Cognition. In it, she looks at a variety of studies to assess the evidence that cephalopods have a form of primary (as opposed to higher-order) consciousness. This is intended as a follow-up on the previous paper on animal consciousness by Seth, Baars and Edelman published in the journal in 2005 (looking at indications of consciousness from the perspective of Bernard Baars’ “global workspace theory”). I had briefly blogged about this article and others on animal consciousness in old posts here and here.



Cephalopods are particularly interesting. First, they’re just cool. More importantly, the convergent evolution of the mind in a lineage so distant from the human tells us something important, I think, about how the building blocks of consciousness are embedded deeply in the fabric of the natural world.

Setting aside higher-order reflective self-consciousness and language-possession, humans likely share with some animals a primary or core consciousness tied to their active engagement with the world. With vertebrates, the symmetries in neurological structure are one aid to assessing the potential for such a shared trait. With cephalopods this is more difficult, but certain brain anatomy-behavior linkages can be explored, and beyond that the full range of behaviors can be surveyed for clues. Mather conducts a meta-analysis of a long list of cephalopod studies to search for this evidence. She finds several areas which offer good support for the existence of primary consciousness in these animals.

With regard to brain anatomy-behavior linkages, she finds similarities in lateralization of functions (which may be linked to consciousness): this is demonstrated in the eye use of octopi in particular but another example is found in the skin displays of squid.

Sleep pattern is another clue to consciousness in animals, and there are similarities found between cephalopods and mammals here.

The developmental aspect of mind is explored: cuttlefish develop improved memory as their brains develop with some parallel to the development of young mammals and human infants.

Learning is another general area explored in many studies and Mather looks at these in some depth. Parallels to “higher” vertebrates are found. Another section explores the sense of self and self-monitoring. Also of interest is that octopi have demonstrated personality differences, and squid have shown intriguing signs of primitive language capability in their skin displays.

All this would suggest cephalopods are good candidates for animals which possess primary consciousness.

UPDATE: I see there was good blog commentary on an earlier online version of this work here and here.

Common Sense: Both Right and Wrong

When it comes to our “folk” intuitions about the conscious self and free will, they can be wrong on the surface but still correct on a deeper level. I was reading Peter’s post on Conscious Entities about a neuroscientific paper on decision-making and conscious awareness (see additional discussion here). Like Libet’s work, the authors of the study appear to show that brain activity indicative of decision making precedes the subject’s awareness of making the choice. This again suggests the folk intuition that free will takes place at the level of reflective conscious awareness is flawed.

I concur with most of the commenters who expressed the view that this outcome has little bearing on the question of determinism and freedom at the metaphysical level. The human brain/body system is very complex and our higher order introspective awareness is a fragile construct embedded in this much larger context. And a simplistic division of the mind into a conscious and unconscious doesn’t do justice to the gradations of awareness.

When it comes to free will, our most fundamental theory of the natural world is indeterministic --it makes me wonder why we are even still debating determinism. There is no principle of quantum physics that states that indeterminism magically vanishes at macroscopic scales (the fact that we don’t observe macroscopic superpositions is not evidence that the large-scale world is described by classical physics). We may not be free in the way we think, but I think we are correct in viewing the future as open and believing that the sequence of natural events in which we participate is undetermined.

But does this imply that events are “just random”? Free choice on the part of a participating system would look like randomness from a third-person perspective. For a formal argument that there is a linkage between microscopic and human freedom, see this old post on the “Free-Will Theorem”.

More About Attention and Consciousness

A new paper by Christopher Mole, called simply “Attention and Consciousness”, is another careful analysis which attempts to deflate overly ambitious conclusions made by other authors when interpreting results in experimental psychology. (The online version is a draft that conforms closely to the version published in the latest Journal of Consciousness Studies).

Some researchers have used experimental evidence to argue that attention is necessary for consciousness (inattentional blindness studies). Others argue from different results (blindsight research) for the conclusion that consciousness is not necessary for attention. In opposition to both these views, Mole outlines the common sense account of the relation between attention and consciousness, which holds that attention requires consciousness (not the other way around), and one is conscious of more than that to which one attends. He argues that this common sense view is not threatened by the experimental evidence.

What makes this tricky is that it certainly is true that some instances and forms of consciousness do require attention. But nonetheless it is wrong to think this fact leads to a conclusion that attention is generally required for consciousness, is coextensive with it, or could exist without it.

One part of Mole’s paper discussing such a form of consciousness which appears to require attention I found interesting in light of the previous discussion in the post about Jason Ford’s paper. When speaking of the performance of subjects in an inattentional blindness study, Mole proposes that attention is required for the subject to deploy conceptual analysis of the experience in order to respond correctly to an experimenter’s question. This suggestion would support the contention that structured conceptual judgments about one’s experience (the kind which may introduce fallibility) are a derived outgrowth of a more extensive “raw” experience. (Note Mole doesn’t discuss this fallibility issue himself in this paper).

There is a good deal of interesting discussion in the paper. I’m sympathetic to Mole’s deflationary interpretations of some of these studies.

Group Field Theory and Emergent Space-Time

This paper by Daniele Oriti includes some ambitious ideas toward a theory of quantum gravity. In its first sections, he introduces his preferred formalism, called Group Field Theory (GFT). He shows how this formalism offers a framework general enough to incorporate aspects of other quantum gravity approaches. He then draws some lessons from these other approaches to suggest a path toward a successful theory by which space-time may be seen to emerge from a discrete quantum micro-structure using a GFT. Interestingly, in light of my last QG post, he takes inspiration from condensed matter theory in advocating his ideas. (My thanks to the anonymous commenter who suggested I look at this paper).

I had come across Oriti’s work before, and my first casual impression was that if GFT was a generalization of quantum field theory which hoped to incorporate gravity, then it might not be too interesting. I had taken to heart the criticisms that approaches which start by extending QFT (like the original string theory) were flawed by not being “background-independent”. Field theory is formulated against a flat space-time background, so how can you get space-time back out of it? As Oriti describes the formalism, while it is a true species of QFT, the way he uses it can be interpreted as modeling pre-geometric discrete quantum gravity elements. If so, then the QFT origin of the mathematical structure may not be an issue. In any case, I’m in no position to make judgments about the merits of the formalism, so I’ll just try to summarize here some the interesting ideas which arise as Oriti explores this framework.

He says the GFT can describe a quantum field in terms of fundamental variables which can be represented either as spin network vertices or elementary (d-1) simplices. Therefore he can draw connections to both the loop quantum gravity/spin foam and dynamical triangulations research programs. He says while there are open issues here, it appears that the GFT formalism can be seen to incorporate enough of these theories (and quantum Regge calculus as well) that he can draw some new lessons from examining certain features of these models from within the GFT framework.

Let me try to see if I can relate what he says the main lesson is (section 3.4 of the paper). These theories have tried to get dynamics from path integrals of the discrete structures they start with. Oriti says what results are the physics of (only) “few-particles”; these approaches lack a way to get interesting large –scale “many-particle” physics which would offer a chance to reveal an emergent space-time “continuum”. GFT offers a way to do a second quantization and field-theoretic analysis of the same starting structures in order to study the complex features which come in the many-particle regime. It is in this regime where we would hope to find an approximation of the continuum space-time described by General Relativity.

One exception to these perceived limitations of the other theories is the Causal version of Dynamical Triangulations (my post on this is here). In this approach, the micro-variables are stripped down to include only causally ordered ones, and the resulting path integral analysis has given interesting results in terms of an emergent four dimensional structure. Oriti suspects, though, that the strict limitations put imposed in CDT may lead one to again prefer analyzing the more general results which can come from using the GFT approach.

Oriti says that condensed matter physics shows the usefulness of field-theoretic and 2nd quantization approaches to studying the collective behavior and statistical properties of many-particle physics. He thinks we should consider quantum space-time as a condensed matter system, with the discrete structures of the GFT formalism as the atoms of space-time, and the continuum space-time as an emergent collective regime. General Relativity would be a hydrodynamic effective description of a quantum space-time fluid. Condensed matter techniques, themselves based on QFT, can point the way for how to research this possibility within GFT. Toward the end of the paper, Oriti offers a speculation that the Bose-Einstein condensate may be the specific analogue to look at (section 7 of the paper). His outline for how this would work is hard for me to follow. Some of the choices one makes in setting the terms in the GFT model seem important, but I can’t offer any opinions on this.

As I’ve said before, I like the idea of having a theory where a discrete quantum micro-physics leads to the space-time of GR in an emergent regime. So Oriti’s work is one I will try to follow as I have the other programs which have this feature. I also like that he wants to incorporate condensed matter physics as a guide to how this works. The parallels between condensed matter physics and fundamental physics are so suggestive that this link should be pursued. I still have a residual worry about the use of a field-theoretic approach which has space and time coordinates in the configuration of the micro-theory. I have this idea that a causal network of elementary quantum systems with absolutely no space-like metric would be a philosophically more appealing starting point. But perhaps this will turn out to be an unfounded worry. I look forward to reading more from Oriti in the future.

Emergent Quantum Gravity Research Series (in chronological order):

What’s New in Quantum Gravity
A section of Lee Smolin’s recent book discusses new approaches.

Causality First
Rafael Sorkin’s Causal Sets and Fotini Markopoulou’s Quantum Causal Histories.

Emerging From the Noise
More on Markopoulou’s approach.

Caution: Universe under Construction
The Causal Dynamical Triangulation program.

Geometrogenesis
More papers from Markopoulou and colleagues.

In the Beginning was the Qubit
Seth Lloyd’s quantum computing-inspired take on quantum gravity.

Dreyer's Internal Relativity
Olaf Dreyer's approach to finding emergent gravity from a quantum mechanical base.

The Superfluid Universe
Grigory Volovik looks for the answers to fundamental physics in the surprising phenomena displayed in condensed matter physics.

The Periphery is the Periphery

A philosopher named Jason Ford offers a dose of sensible phenomenology in a well written article called “Attention and the New Sceptics” which appears in the latest issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies (unfortunately not free online). The subject is the proper interpretation of the various interesting studies on inattentional blindness and change blindness.

In various ways these studies show that our ability to make judgments about phenomena on the periphery when attention is elsewhere is poor relative to our ex ante expectations. (Think of the research using the now famous video of people passing a ball among themselves and the inability of most people to detect the entrance of a gorilla when asked to focus on counting passes). Ford’s article discusses the work of several philosophers who take these results as evidence for a broader reaching skepticism about the reliability of consciousness. They think they can argue we don’t have the conscious experience we think we do. Ford argues that they are mistaken in arguing that such skepticism is warranted by the research. Careful analysis of focal and peripheral perception shows that they are fundamentally different in character when it comes to their availability for detailed judgment and comparisons. It is a mistake to hold the periphery to the same standard as the focus of attention: “Being vague and nebulous just is the way the periphery registers in consciousness”.

Once this is acknowledged, one cannot argue from these results that we don’t have the conscious experience we think we have. It remains a viable assertion that when we claim we know what it is like to experience what we’re focused on, we are not in error.

By the way, in the course of the article, Ford does a good job reminding us what such a claim of infallibility is and is not. The claim says nothing about the following ways we can be mistaken (p.62):

"We can be mistaken about the proximate causes of our experience… We can be mistaken about how our biology produces experience…We can make mistaken categorical judgments when we try to classify our conscious experiences…Our memories are fallible."

To this list, he says, we can add that we need to be very careful when making claims about the content of the periphery of attention. But skepticism about our knowing what our own experience is like is unfounded.

Endnote: it’s been awhile since I’ve written on phenomenology – here’s the list of posts with that label. These are mostly focused on the key insight of continental thinkers: analysis of everyday lived experience (now often called primary or core consciousness ) offers the best hope for insights in the philosophy of mind. The other side of this coin is that higher-order reflective self-consciousness (a derivative late-comer to evolution), while central in our lives, can give a misleading picture of how experience fits into the natural world.

Off Topic: Election Post

March 24th is the deadline to register to vote, or to change party affiliation, prior to the April 22 Pennsylvania primary election. Please spread the word to anyone who might wish to register. Here's a link. Thanks.

The Gospel of Judas, Take Two

I had previously blogged (here) about the Gospel of Judas, a circa second century product of a Sethian gnostic Christian community. The very interesting story of the tenuous survival and laborious reconstruction of the crumbling ancient codex containing the Judas text -- along with a first translation and interpretation -- was the subject of a book and television special sponsored by National Geographic. The National Geographic team of scholars (led by Marvin Meyer) presented the sensational finding that Judas was the hero of the text: the only apostle who really understood Jesus’ divinity, and whose betrayal of Jesus -- necessary to fulfill God’s plan – made him favored above all the apostles.

Following the publishing of the Coptic transcription, other scholars have had a crack at translation and interpretation and some differing and contrary opinions are emerging. A very different take has been offered by April DeConick in her recent book, The Thirteenth Apostle: What the Gospel of Judas Really Says.

DeConick, a biblical studies scholar who also has an active and interesting blog, believes that the National Geographic team made several translation errors which led to an overall erroneous interpretation of the message of the gospel (please note that no scholar believes this text has any historical value regarding the actual events of Jesus’ life; rather the interest is in what the text tells us about the beliefs of one of the many early Christian communities opposed to the “apostolic” or proto-orthodox church in the centuries before the time of Constantine). According to DeConick, while Judas does have greater understanding than the other apostles (who are completely misguided), he is nonetheless a doomed and (literally) demonic figure. So while the text is still very much in opposition to apostolic Christianity (indeed she views it as a parody of sorts), the figure of Judas is still to be seen as a bad guy, not the good guy put forth by the National Geographic team.

It is very interesting to see how a handful of translation choices could lead to such greatly contrasting interpretations of the text (although the fact that the text is missing significant passages contributes to the difficulty of all of these efforts). The most important of these choices relates to the translation of the Greek-imported word “daimon” (referring to Judas) as “spirit” by the National Geographic team, and “demon” by DeConick. According to DeConick, the word had evolved from classical times from the general idea of a spiritual entity to the specifically evil connotation by the time of “Judas”. For online discussions of all this, see DeConick’s New York Times op-ed, Marvin Meyer’s response, her Judas blogging and these online reviews of her book. I found DeConick’s arguments persuasive, but as a non-expert I look forward to reading further discussion of this by other commentators.

The book itself has additional merit for those lay readers who are interested in the subject. DeConick includes a very clear discussion of the various “gnostic” communities in play in early Christianity. She is very good specifically on the Sethian movement, to which the author of the Gospel of Judas belongs. Her exposition of the complex Sethian cosmology was very good – I had previously found this to be pretty confusing. The book also includes her complete translation, which provides the reader the context for the interpretative debate.

Fetal Pain Article in New York Times

There was an interesting article on fetal pain in the New York Times magazine. I’m not an expert, but I thought it gave a pretty good overview of current scientific/medical viewpoints based on things I had previously read (a previous lengthier post on this topic is here).

My opinion is that given the trend in research findings here (and in related areas like awareness in brain-damaged patients and animals) it is increasingly untenable to keep to a view that only fully developed healthy human nervous systems “count” when assessing whether meaningful first-person experience exists. The pain experience felt by a 20-week old fetus that lacks a developed cerebral cortex will almost certainly differ from ours, perhaps to the point that it shouldn’t be called “pain” at all. But to assume that the stress responses observed are not accompanied by some meaningful correlated experience seems highly dubious. Given the limit on our ability to know “what it’s like” in the absence of a first-person report, it makes sense to err on the side of caution.

UPDATE (25 Feb.2008): please see also the post on this at Conscious Entities.

A Dualism of Perspectives, not Properties

I recommend Justin’s recent post on his Panexperientialism blog. In it he looks at Fiona Macpherson’s reply to Galen Strawson’s 2006 Journal of Consciousness Studies target article on the mind-body problem: "Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism". Justin critiques section 3 of Macpherson’s article where she compares her summary of Strawson’s view -- which she characterizes as a micro-level variety of property dualism – to a possible alternative view where the experiential properties are the familiar "macro" human experiences. Justin concludes that the “micro” version is the superior view. I agree.

I want to say a few words prompted by the previous section of Macpherson’s paper. This is where she examined Strawson in relation to traditional categories of philosophical views and placed him the property-dualist “box” in the first place.

In addition to the Strawson’s original article and 17 responses including Macpherson’s, the JCS compilation in turn included an extended further reply by Strawson (unfortunately no free online version). My earlier post discussing this is here (more posts on Strawson here). While Macpherson (reasonably) uses excerpts from Strawson’s target article to argue that he is a substance monist (of sorts) and a property dualist, I think it’s important to note that he showed in his reply that he was intent on moving beyond these labels in his quest to understand how concrete reality can be all of one basic character, yet still support both irreducible experiential and non-experiential truths.

Here is my paraphrase of some of his key points (with which I concur).

If we were to resolve the tension between our preference for monism and reality’s apparent split into experiential and non-experiential aspects by giving up our commitment to one or the other aspect, we would be forced to give up the non-experiential. This is because experience is what we know best -- prior to our knowledge of other truths.

If all phenomena are experiential, and there is a pluralism of phenomena, then each phenomenon has both an “inside” and an “outside”. The dualism we seem forced to acknowledge is not an ontological dualism, but a dualism of perspectives. What we think of as non-experiential facts are third-person facts, but they are nonetheless experiential to participating systems. These third-person facts are in fact the causal relations and/or constitutive relations between and among experiential events.

The Superfluid Universe

Several advocates of an “emergence” approach to fundamental physics come from the world of condensed matter physics (an old blog post which briefly discussed Robert B. Laughlin’s views is here).

Grigory Volovik is a prominent (and award-winning) theorist who has been working on applying the knowledge gained in his research on superfluids to the case of explaining how gravity and the matter fields of current theory may themselves be emergent features of a deeper reality – a sort of “super” quantum vacuum. {UPDATED 2 February 2008 -- minor edits}

Until recently I had only read a little about superfluids or condensed matter physics. Superfluids have surprising collective behaviors (like zero viscosity) which can be topologically stable despite micro-physical imperfections. Although their characteristics are exhibited at a macroscopic scale, the tools of quantum field theory are needed to explain them. As he explains in this older article (from 1999), Volovik thinks one particular variety of superfluid even displays characteristics which make it a good model for the entire universe: this is the one created by supercooling the He-3 helium isotope. In reaching this conclusion, he explains that the condensed matter system used must be fermionic. We need both fermionic and bosonic fields and in the He-3 superfluid the atoms behave as fermions, and quantum bose fields appear as low-energy collective modes. (Interestingly, in He-4 superfluid, the atoms behave as bosons – who knew? – and I guess there is no analogous way to recover fermions as some collective mode). Now, a He-3 superfluid is not the only fermionic system (or Fermi system) known, and Volovik explains how the topologies differ between the alternatives (he looks at systems which feature a “Fermi surface” as opposed to the “Fermi point” of He-3). He concludes the He-3 superfluid’s topology has the symmetries which create analogous features with the quantum fields of particle physics and also of gravity. It is hard for me to follow the details, but it looks like an impressive match, although Volovik concedes in the article that he hasn’t shown that analogies exist for quite the whole particle zoo of the standard model.

Now, in this recent paper, “Emergent Physics: Fermi point scenario”, one can see that Volovik’s confidence that his work shows the right path to fundamental physics has grown. In the paper, he begins by discussing the cosmological constant problem and the particle mass hierarchy problem, as a prelude to explaining why they are more natural expectations of his model.

First he explains that in a Fermi point vacuum all of physical laws (except for quantum mechanics itself) can be seen as effective laws which naturally emerge at low energy. He discusses again how the symmetries of the Fermi point system give one the fields of particle physics and gravity. He then shows how vacuum energies get nullified in a way that leads to consistency with a low cosmological constant. When it comes to the hierarchy problem, the Fermi point system has elements which come from macroscopic (topologically robust) emergent features and ones which come from micro-structure. The observed masses (or zero masses) of various particles are shown to be consistent (in approximate order of magnitude) with the model. (Again, I have trouble following the specific arguments here, so please see the paper.)

In a concluding section, Volovik explains the contrast between his approach, which treats gravity as an effective emergent theory, and other approaches to quantum gravity which treat general relativity as something fundamental and then try (so far unsuccessfully) to unify it with the standard model.

(Note also that Volovik has a full-length book on this topic, which I have not read, called: The Universe in a Helium Droplet)

This is the first time I’ve grappled with Volovik’s approach and any thoughts I have are extremely tentative. I would say at this point that his model adds to a growing argument that emergent approaches to fundamental physics are promising. On the other hand, it still seems to be more of an analogy rather than a candidate for a fundamental theory. The reason I say this is that the toolkit for analyzing the Fermi point system (and other condensed matter systems) is quantum field theory. The approach, then, seems to have a circular aspect to it: one is trying to explain gravity (among other things) using a theory which has a formalism which embeds a background (flat, special relativistic) space-time. If there could be a way to get the same kind of outcome starting only with (a network of?) elementary quantum mechanical systems, that might be a better candidate for a fundamental theory.

Sam Harris on Religious Experience

Over the holidays I watched most of the video of a dialogue among Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris (the “Four Horsemen” of the recent mini-boom in books criticizing religion by atheists). There was a brief discussion near the beginning led by Harris which I wanted to highlight (the transcript is here). One thing I have liked about Harris, who is pursuing a doctorate in neuroscience in his day job, is his respect for the challenge that the “hard problem” of first person conscious experience poses for a conventionally materialistic worldview. In the video, he discusses an obstacle to the ability of the atheists to win the hearts and minds of believers: the phenomenon of what is traditionally referred to as “religious” experience.

Here’s the excerpt:

[Harris] Well. I think there's one answer to that question which may illuminate a difference, or at least the difference that I have, I think, maybe with all three of you. There's something about … I mean, I still use words like "spiritual" and "mystical" without furrowing my brow too much and, I admit, to the consternation of many atheists. I think there is a range of experience that is rare, and that is only talked about without obvious qualms in religious discourse. And because it's only talked about in religious discourse, it is just riddled with superstition. And it's used to cash out various metaphysical schemes which it can't reasonably do. But clearly people have extraordinary experiences. Whether they have them on LSD, or they have them because they were alone in a cave for a year, or they have them because just happen to have the neurology that is particularly labile that allows for it, but people have self-transcending experiences. And people have the best day of their life where everything seemed, you know, they seemed at one with nature. And for that, because religion seems to be the only game in town in talking about those experiences and dignifying them, that's one reason why I think it seems to be taboo to criticise it, because you are talking about the most important moments in people's lives and trashing them, at least from their view.

[Dawkins] Well, I don't have to agree with you, Sam, in order to say that it's a very good thing you're saying that sort of thing, because it shows that, as you say, religion is not the only game in town when it comes to being spiritual. It's like it's a good idea to have somebody from the political right who is an atheist, because otherwise there's a confusion of values which doesn't help us. And it's much better to have this diversity in other areas. But I think I sort of do agree with you. But even if I didn't, I think it was valuable to have that.

[Harris] Right.

[Hitchens] If one could make one change, and only one, mine would be to distinguish the numinous from the supernatural.

[Dawkins] Yes.

[Harris] Right.

[Hitchens] You had a marvelous quotation from Francis Collins, the genome pioneer, who said, while mountaineering one day, he was so overcome by the landscape, and then went down on his knees and accepted Jesus Christ. A complete non sequitur.

I agree with the spirit of that last comment by Hitchens – I find it extremely implausible to think that someone who has not been exposed to Christianity will ever have any vision or experience specific to it. People have experiences marked by powerful positive feelings of transcendence, unity, etc. and then interpret them through the familiar conceptual lens which appears to do justice to them.

Where I go further than Harris does here is that I see this as a special example of the general problem of first person experience. People mostly don’t think experience is an accidental part of an essentially non-experiential reality. They think experience is something fundamental, and I agree. The trick is to see that one can have a worldview which privileges experience in this way without otherwise embracing supernatural entities or interventions.

Smolin and Rovelli Respond to Edge's Annual Question

The Edge annual question for this year, asked of over 100 scientists, journalists, and assorted intellectual types was “What have you changed your mind about and why?” I checked out the responses of some of the physicists who participated.

Lee Smolin’s entry discusses the impact that his evolving views about time have had on his quantum gravity work. His earlier research was on loop quantum gravity (LQG), which as it seeks to quantize the geometry described by general relativity results in a basically “timeless” theory (unlike quantum mechanics itself, where a background time is part of the picture). Now, however, Smolin has come to believe that time, in the guise of causality, needs to be a fundamental element of a theory. This leads him to be interested in theories where causality is built in at the ground level and where the more familiar “laws of physics” (general relativity and quantum field theory) are emergent features which may themselves evolve in time (for more see my previous post on Smolin).

It was interesting to me to note a contrast with fellow loop quantum gravity pioneer Carlo Rovelli. Rovelli’s entry was about his realization that the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics made sense, but not if you tried to apply it to the whole universe. The insight led to his formulation of relational quantum mechanics a bit over 10 years ago. Now, from my outsider’s perspective, it seems that Rovelli’s relational qm is philosophically in harmony with Smolin’s interest in “emergent” quantum gravity approaches which start with a causal network of quantum systems at the fundamental level. However, while Rovelli says that relational qm has “affected substantially” his quantum gravity work, in his case, it appears this involves inspiring the ongoing extensions to the loop program rather than working on approaches which have a different fundamental starting point.

Finally, relevant to this topic is John Baez on why he decided to stop working on quantum gravity.

Mike's Concluding Thoughts on Schopenhauer

Below is the last part of Mike Wiest's review of and reflections on The World as Will and Representation, Volume One. The first two parts are here and here.

Well, I guess you can tell because I wrote this that I was impressed by Schopenhauer’s book. It seems to me to belong among the greatest works of philosophy ever, and to be the first (only?) time a major Western philosopher really absorbed the Eastern insights. But I may be still in the infatuated stage.

I guess the theory of determinism and freedom I gleaned from Volume 1 is not entirely satisfactory, but I think it is more than the usual semantic sophisms that attempt to make freedom and determinism compatible. Although S comes off as mainly determinist, I think it is an open question whether his scheme could be adapted to a quantum ontology (for example if quantum events are determined by nonlocal factors scattered all over spacetime including in the future). Maybe I’m also more open to him than most determinists because he admits and explains a much greater range of phenomena, such as the claims and behavior of mystics, than hard-core 19th-century-style determinists.

I fell in love with Kant when I read his abridged Critique of Pure Reason, I think mainly because of my pet interest in quantum and mental holism, and he was constantly talking about the various unities of the mind which people seem not to appreciate anymore. But reading S gave me a perspective from which to realize that a lot of Kant really is obscure (and according to S actually motivated by a perverse desire to symmetrically fill out tables of 12 categories), and a pretty clear and intuitive way to separate the baby from the bathwater. So S boiled down Kant’s baroque a priori subjective framework to basically spacetime and causality. I think this might be a great insight that survives the invention of non-Euclidian geometry and relativity theory. Why? Because, for example, it does seem that our perceptual intuitions really are in Euclidian space, and when we envision curved spaces we do so in Euclidian space, such as a 2D spherical surface in 3D.

That said, it is still hard to go along with S (or Kant) when he concludes that there is no space or time for the thing-in-itself. That is, it is relatively easy to accept that each of our subjective worlds are subjective brain constructs, but to take the next step to say that real objects are not objects at all, and don’t exist in an external spacetime, even though we can independently experience them and “cross-check” their existence, is difficult. [cf. Zen koan #43 Shuzan’s staff: “Shuzan held up his staff before the assembled monks, saying “If you say this is a staff, you oppose its reality. If you say this is not a staff, you negate the fact. I ask you, what is this?”] Maybe the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics gives us a framework for realizing S’s version of “empirical realism, transcendental idealism.”

Before reading S, I thought that maybe his pessimism was overstated by religiously-minded critics as a lazy way of dismissing his theory. Now I have to admit that his pessimism is pretty deep. It’s almost funny at times—at one point he even remarks how depressing the discussion is getting. If he gives up the purposelessness of the will, though, he will lose a major advantage over every optimistic philosophy—namely, that the problem of evil and suffering is not really a (philosophical) problem for him. (It remains a personal problem.) There is no good or even intelligent God to be paradoxically responsible for evil and suffering.

On the other hand, he is arguably no more pessimistic than Buddhism, since he affirms a path to a form of salvation. Also, the will in his theory seems to harbor a hidden dynamic—or will—towards realization, where realization means individuation and objectification but also enlightenment. Thus, although he argues against the notion of any permanent progress, his own contribution to the real progress of philosophy might be seen as part of a universal evolution towards “universal enlightenment” or “heaven on earth.” It’s a bit of a stretch…

Bottom line: In terms of his utility for us as students of the mind-body problem, I don’t think we get any new ideas about how the line between conscious and unconscious brain processes would show up in biology. What we may get is a (provisionally) consistent metaphysics that relates mind and matter without elimination, and explains the real basis of our moral sentiments. It’s also a pre-Freudian explicit theory of the unconscious. If you’re into this kind of thing, it’s an exhilarating ride!

Markopoulou Article

The Foundational Questions Institute (home page here) has a "community" web-page which features articles and blog posts relating to the work of those who have received grants. They have put up an article (in pdf) on Fotini Markopoulou and her quantum gravity program. (my posts on Markopoulou's work in reverse chronological order are here, here, and here).