Why is panpsychism counterintuitive?
We shouldn't credit our innate bias against it.
I think it’s incumbent on panpsychists to explain why their view typically strikes people as counterintuitive. I believe it is the main problem for panpsychism, whether or not it’s recognized as such. There’s a presumption against the view, and that’s mainly due to its perceived weirdness. Of course, “It’s weird” is not a good argument, but there’s no denying that panpsychism is beginning at a disadvantage because of its weirdness.
I am torn between panpsychism and dualism, broadly construed. I’m most tempted by dualism when the counterintuitiveness of panpsychism makes itself apparent, when I’m aware of how divorced the panpsychist view of nature seems from my ordinary life and ordinary interactions with the world. The more weight I afford to common sense and my intuitive, pre-reflective picture of the world, the less attractive panpsychism seems. Obviously, I’m not naturally inclined to attribute consciousness to any cluster of physical activity that doesn’t at least resemble an animal in its general form and its behavior.
I think there are essentially three main reasons most people come to the table biased against panpsychism. First, I think our theory of mind is only triggered under specific conditions. But it’s not phenomenal consciousness per se that triggers our theory of mind, causing us to attribute consciousness to others. What does activate our mind-attribution is typically associated with phenomenal consciousness, but not necessarily. Even assuming panpsychism is true, evolution would still have endowed us with faculties that are highly discriminatory when it comes to mind-attribution. We’ll be diving more into that in a moment.
I almost didn’t include this second reason, but I suppose I should mention one minor confusion that can contribute to the perceived implausibility of panpsychism. If it needs to be said: panpsychism does not entail that everything is conscious. Panpsychists typically don’t think that anything you can name – drapes, mangos, a tumbleweed – is a genuine subject of experience. It would take panpsychism plus other views, like mereological universalism or unrestricted composition, to get the result that everything is conscious. But as far as I know, most panpsychists don’t think everything is conscious. How is that? Well, you could rightly say that my index finger is associated with experience or experience-involving, but it doesn’t follow that my index finger is a subject of experience. You could rightly say that a football team or a group of people is associated with experience or experience-involving, but it doesn’t follow that the group forms a subject of experience.
The third major reason is how we are naturally inclined to think about consciousness. (This could be divided into two parts.)
It takes a little effort to conceptually separate phenomenal consciousness from the myriad of activity that occurs in the mind. Panpsychists think consciousness is fundamental and ubiquitous, but we often have to clarify that what we mean by consciousness involves a fairly short list of very basic features of the mind. On panpsychism, human consciousness is a rare form of consciousness in the universe. It would indeed seem very implausible and unmotivated to attribute something like human minds to non-humans or animal minds to non-animals.
The second reason within this subcategory has to do with how we conceptualize what consciousness is in a different sense. According to psychologist Paul Bloom, we are “natural born dualists” – we are highly disposed to think of the mind and the body as two separate entities. And according to physicalist David Papineau, even a lot of physicalists haven’t fully shaken off their default dualist programming. In fact, he thinks this is one of the major reasons physicalists find panpsychism counterintuitive. If they would stop thinking like dualists and more like physicalists, they wouldn’t find panpsychism so counterintuitive.
Mind-Attribution & Evolutionary History
Through the unforgiving history of evolution, humans have developed faculties that aid in our navigation of the environment. I naturally am inclined or disposed to form a host of beliefs about other minds, the external world, and mundane facts that we typically don’t think about too often. We really are amazing creatures. It is impressive that we human beings get the right answers to so many questions. But it makes sense that we have generally reliable cognitive faculties. If we didn’t, the odds are overwhelmingly that we would be selected against. Natural selection is ruthless, and any organism like us that was hopelessly confused and unable to form a generally truth-tracking picture of the world it needs to navigate would probably get taken out of the gene pool.
We have default settings, as it were: An intuitive physics, which accurately guides us through the world of middle-sized objects in our immediate environment. We’re really good at knowing how physical things behave at this scale. Not so much in the realms of the very small or the very large, or unimaginably long or short timescales; but we do successfully form true beliefs about the parts of the physical world most relevant to our survival and reproduction. You don’t need to understand quarks to pass on your genes. You do need to be able to respond accordingly to this middle-sized stuff around you.
A lot of that middle-sized stuff around you isn’t just inanimate matter. It’s alive. And some of these living things around you have a rich inner mental life and a complex psychology. For evolutionary success, you also need factory settings when it comes to understanding these things as well – you’ll need an intuitive psychology along with your intuitive physics. I’m not saying that you come pre-programmed with beliefs about these subjects, exactly, but you at least come with the capacity to develop or acquire an intuitive physics, psychology, biology, and so on. For example, you were not born with the English language encoded into your DNA or downloaded onto your brain, but you do have the capacity to learn language, while chimps, cats, and oak trees do not have that capacity. They cannot acquire language from their environment.
Regardless of how it works exactly, humans somehow ended up with general, default settings when it comes to our common sense physics and psychology. Evolution clearly played a major part in shaping how we see the world. You’re not a blank slate, and natural selection can help us explain human nature.
False Positives, False Negatives
If you’re interested in apologetics and philosophy of religion, you’ve probably heard of hyperactive or hypersensitive agency detection (HAD). According to psychologist Justin Barrett, this is the tendency to attribute agency and intentionality where it does not exist or is unlikely to exist.
Here’s a famous example. Imagine you’re on the plains of Africa 10,000 years ago and you hear a rustle in the grass. It could be a predator, or it could be the wind or something totally innocuous. The evolutionary advantage of getting the answer right is obvious, but let’s think about what happens if you’re wrong. Say you assume it’s nothing, but it’s actually a predator. That’s a false negative, and now you’ve been removed from the gene pool. But let’s say you assume it’s a predator, and it turns out to be nothing. That’s a false positive, and it didn’t really cost you anything. False positives are a lot less costly than false negatives. So the thinking goes that natural selection favors false positives over false negatives when it comes to agency detection. We’re all descended from those who heard a rustle in the grass and either ran away or prepared to fight.
We’re not the only ones. If you’re sitting by the fireplace with your dog on a snowy evening, and some snow falls off the roof and collides with the ground, the dog will often start barking or growling, or at least start paying attention to potential danger. The same evolutionary pressures were active in his biological history, too.
In psychology, theory of mind refers to the capacity to understand the minds of others – their beliefs, thoughts, desires, intentions, and emotions. Other animals need a theory of mind as well. Is this creature a threat to me? How does it feel? Does it want to eat me? Is it angry? Human beings, since we navigate a complex social environment, require a far more advanced theory of mind.
Theory of mind involves something a lot more basic, as well: Attributing consciousness to some objects but not others. Detecting a mind in the first place is step one, and this capacity of ours misfires all the time, probably because of the evolutionary pressure to favor false positives over false negatives. Have you ever heard a bump in the night and were unable to suppress the thought that maybe it’s someone and not something?
False positives get all the press because (a) it’s the kind of error favored by natural selection, and (b) it could play some role in the formation of supernatural beliefs. Our natural inclination to over-attribute agency to natural events and see minds where there are none strikes a lot of nonbelievers as fairly suggestive.
But what about false negatives? Do those ever occur? Well, yes – all the time. We sometimes fail to detect agency where there is agency; we sometimes fail to detect a mind where there is a mind. For example, some animals have excellent camouflage. Even animals who don’t put a lot of eggs in the camouflage basket still often blend in with their surroundings. Especially if you’re not looking hard for them, it is very easy to walk right by an animal and commit a false negative.
In another vein, think about newborn babies. These days, most people accept that babies are sentient and can feel pain. But that was not always the case. As Jonathan Birch notes,
“In the 1980s, it was still apparently common to perform surgery on newborn babies without anesthetic on both sides of the Atlantic. This led to appalling cases, and to public outcry, and to campaigns to change clinical practice. … People don’t need convincing anymore that we should take newborn human babies seriously as sentience candidates. But the tale is a useful cautionary tale, because it shows you how deep that overconfidence can run and how problematic it can be. It just underlines this point that overconfidence about sentience is everywhere and is dangerous.”
Birch also notes cases of coma patients who were apparently conscious for at least parts of their coma, completely unbeknownst to the medical professionals working on them. False negatives do happen, and the consequences can be horrifying.
Famously, Descartes argued that non-human animals were automata. They didn’t have feelings or experiences, so one could do whatever they liked to these real-life philosophical zombies without worrying about causing any pain or suffering. Today, there are still some complete fucking idiots who hold to a view like this. Descartes held not just that humans are conscious, but only humans are conscious. Supposedly, a follower of Descartes’ once kicked a pregnant dog and when his companions berated him, he replied that the dog’s cries were only like the rattling of gears.
I don’t think that Descartes and his followers were naturally disposed to think that dogs couldn’t feel pain. I think it was rather the product of bad theorizing about consciousness (among other things). False negatives can have a variety of causes.
“What is matter? the whole thing a mystery.”
Materialism and dualism have something interesting in common – their general understanding of matter. The materialist and the dualist both reject views like Russellian panpsychism, which holds that the intrinsic nature of the physical itself is mental. The materialist/dualist view of matter – namely, that it either has no intrinsic nature or that its intrinsic nature is non-mental in character – is plausibly a product of our default human wiring. We have a set of inclinations, dispositions, and psychological tendencies to form certain beliefs and to attribute mind to certain configurations of matter but not others.
The reason panpsychism is so counterintuitive is because our natural, default settings – our intuitive physics and our intuitive psychology – strongly dispose us to only attribute minds in certain cases involving complex behavior. We are highly discriminatory in our attribution of consciousness. From these natural tendencies, inclinations, and dispositions, we theorize and reify our overconfidence about the lack of sentience in most of the natural world.
Erwin Schrödinger once defined life as a physical process that continues on long after it should’ve stopped. I think there’s something very similar at work with conscious life specifically.
What triggers our theory of mind is the observation of forms and behaviors that naturally lead us to apply psychological concepts. We’re extremely selective when it comes to using such language; or at least using it and taking it seriously. But what does that have to do with phenomenal consciousness? It’s reasonable to think that anything with a complex psychology – a real-world case where it seems appropriate to apply our standard psychological concepts – is probably going to be phenomenally conscious. But is everything phenomenally conscious going to trigger our theory of mind? Is it true that anything phenomenally conscious is also going to be a case where it seems appropriate to apply psychological concepts? Well, no.
On a conceptual level, we can separate the functional and behavioral aspects of complex psychology on the one hand from the phenomenal aspect on the other. It could be like something to exist for a subject with no complex psychology. And we can conceive of philosophical zombies, or a complicated AI that has something resembling complex psychology without being phenomenally conscious. Conceptually, it’s not too hard to separate out what-it’s-likeness from the kind of thing natural selection is sensitive to, the kind of thing that’s relevant to survival and reproduction.
I think this is helpful in understanding why we are inclined to attribute mind to monkeys and cats but not houseplants. We don’t need to invoke psychological or mental concepts to explain the behavior of plants. Some people do, even though they typically don’t take it seriously or literally. I mean, we also do it with (e.g.) chemistry. Mentalistic language slips into our causal language all the time. (Perhaps there’s a reason for this…) But it’s really only when physical activity becomes so complex, when it keeps moving long after it should have stopped, that we start to apply mental concepts and actually take it seriously.
We don’t just care whether it’s like something to be a tiger – we care about its complex psychological (i.e., functional and behavioral) states. That’s what has evolutionary relevance. That’s what natural selection is sensitive to. Not the mere presence of some bare kind of sentience. Why and how would natural selection be sensitive to the presence or absence of phenomenal consciousness? Complex psychological states have obvious evolutionary relevance, but the mere presence of what-it’s-likeness…? It’s hard to see (a) how natural selection even could be sensitive to that, and (b) why it would be sensitive to it.
Say that there is an intrinsic nature of matter, and say that it is mental in character. How would that have influenced evolutionary history? How would that change our default psychological profile? It wouldn’t! We would still have exactly the same set of biases.
It might be useful at this point to recall one of the most common confusions regarding panpsychism. Panpsychists think consciousness is fundamental and ubiquitous, but we often have to clarify that what we mean by consciousness involves a fairly short list of very basic features of the mind. We often have to clarify that we’re talking about phenomenal consciousness, not the rich and complicated inner lives of adult human beings, or even that of a newborn. In other words, nothing that would trigger the application of psychological concepts.
Is the fact that it’s “like something to be” the feature that’s relevant to natural selection, which shaped our theory of mind? Or is it rather something entirely distinct that is typically associated with phenomenal consciousness? I think it’s entirely possible that we are systemically in error when it comes to the attribution of experience. We know we can make these kinds of errors – false negatives – as the consequence of a variety of causes. Assuming panpsychism is true, something like this would have to be the case – we’d have to be systemically in error. And if panpsychism is true, it’s hard to see how evolutionary history would have gone any differently than it would have if physicalism were true.
My only aim here is to describe why panpsychism is counterintuitive, not to motivate the view with arguments. I’m only explaining why panpsychism conflicts with our pre-reflective image of the world. We do form accurate beliefs about the external world and other minds, but natural selection does not care whether there is phenomenal consciousness associated with simpler forms of physical activity. We attribute minds and apply psychological concepts when it would be otherwise hard to explain behavior, but this is not the same thing as being gifted with a phenomenal consciousness detector! Not at all. Whether or not the intrinsic nature of physical activity is experiential, we would have ended up with the same highly discriminatory mind-attribution module. It’s our default human psychology that causes us to come to the table already biased against it. The reason you feel that panpsychism is counterintuitive is because of inbuilt psychological tendencies that you have no reason to trust on the matter.
This is why I take panpsychism so much more seriously than others. If it’s evaluated on its merits, it has quite a lot going for it and not a lot going against it. It’s the presumption of guilt that keeps people from seeing this, the inbuilt incredulity that is the product of fallible cognitive faculties – faculties that we already know make exactly the type of error that would lead us to think panpsychism is counterintuitive. Indeed, the type of error we would still expect to see even if panpsychism is true.
So when one looks at panpsychism without the priors weighing insanely against it, it seems like a plausible alternative to the traditional views. It has some of the advantages of physicalism and some of the advantages of dualism without their alleged problems. But it’s not my aim to motivate panpsychism today. Just to create the conditions where one can actually see the motivations.