Panpsychism and the Emergence of Consciousness: A Proposal for a New Solution to the Mind-Body Problem

240 Pages·2020·1.584 MB·English

by  Fabian Klinge

Fabian Klinge
Panpsychism and
the Emergence of
Consciousness
A Proposal for a New Solution to the
Mind-Body Problem
Panpsychism and the Emergence of
Consciousness
Fabian Klinge
Panpsychism and
the Emergence of
Consciousness
A Proposal for a New Solution to the
Mind-Body Problem
Fabian Klinge
Universität Tübingen
Tübingen, Germany
Dissertation zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades Doktor der
Philosophie in der Philosophischen Fakultät der Eberhard Karls
Universität Tübingen, angenommen im Sommersemester 2019.
Gefördert durch ein Promotionsstipendium der Konrad Adenauer
Stiftung, 2015–2018.
ISBN 978-3-662-62257-5 ISBN 978-3-662-62258-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-62258-2
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer-Verlag
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Table of Contents
List of Figures and Tables..........................................................................................................ix
Acknowledgments......................................................................................................................xi
1 Introduction...........................................................................................................................xiii
2 Physicalism and Fundamentalism............................................................................................1
2.1 Metaphysical Dependence................................................................................................1
2.1.1 Identity, Multiple Realizability, and Functionalism.................................................2
2.1.2 The Hyperintensionalist Turn and Metaphysical Fundamentalism..........................4
2.1.3 Sider’s Version of Fundamentalism..........................................................................7
2.1.4 The Fine-Dasgupta Account of Metaphysical Grounding......................................10
2.2 What is ‘Physical’?.........................................................................................................13
3 The Case Against Physicalism...............................................................................................19
3.1 Special Epistemic Gaps..................................................................................................20
3.1.1 Three Epistemic Gaps.............................................................................................20
3.1.2 Are the Gaps Special?.............................................................................................23
3.2 Chalmers’ Two-Dimensional Argument.........................................................................29
3.2.1 The Architecture of the Argument..........................................................................29
3.2.2 Various Objections..................................................................................................31
3.2.3 Goff’s Transparency Conceivability Argument......................................................36
3.3 The Phenomenal Concept Strategy................................................................................38
3.4 Two Problems for the Strategy.......................................................................................43
3.4.1 Levine’s Lack-of-Thickness Objection...................................................................43
3.4.2 Chalmers’ Master Argument...................................................................................47
4 Understanding Emergence.....................................................................................................55
4.1 The Notion of Emergence..............................................................................................56
4.2 Kinds of Emergence.......................................................................................................58
4.3 Varieties of Emergent Phenomena..................................................................................60
4.3.1 Epistemologically Emergent Phenomena in Complex Systems.............................60
4.3.2 Realized Phenomena as Metaphysically Weakly Emergent Entities......................62
4.3.3 Reductively Unpredictable Behavior in Cell Biology............................................64
4.3.4 Macrophenomenality as Ontologically Emergent Phenomenon............................65
4.4 Autonomy and Dependence............................................................................................67
4.5 Strong Autonomy...........................................................................................................69
4.6 The Power Inheritance Objection...................................................................................72
4.6.1 Solution I: Causal Emergence................................................................................74
4.6.2 Solution II: Micro-Latent Grounding Bases...........................................................75
4.6.3 Solution III: The New Power Condition.................................................................79
4.6.4 Solution IV: Emergence as Fusion..........................................................................85
4.7 Causal Ontological Emergence......................................................................................88
4.7.1 Micro-Latent Emergence Bases..............................................................................91
vi Contents
4.7.2 Strong Dependence as Causal Relation..................................................................91
4.7.3 The Explicability of Ontologically Emergent Phenomena.....................................98
5 Alternatives to Physicalism..................................................................................................101
5.1 Varieties of Antiphysicalism.........................................................................................101
5.2 Dualism........................................................................................................................104
5.3 Russellian Monism.......................................................................................................105
5.3.1 Dispositionalism and Russellian Categoricalism..................................................105
5.3.2 The Circularity Objection to Dispositionalism.....................................................109
5.3.3 The Power-Swapping Problem for Categoricalism...............................................111
5.4 Problems for Dualism...................................................................................................113
5.4.1 The Pairing Problem.............................................................................................115
5.4.2 The Causal Exclusion Problem.............................................................................122
5.4.3 The Fundamental Interaction Problem.................................................................131
5.5 Mental Causation in Russellian Monism......................................................................134
5.6 Panpsychism or Panprotopsychism?............................................................................136
6 Problems for Constitutive Russellian Panpsychism.............................................................139
6.1 Multiple Combination Problems..................................................................................139
6.2 James’ Original Argument............................................................................................139
6.3 The Conceivability Argument Redux...........................................................................140
6.4 Phenomenal Bonding and Consciousness+..................................................................141
6.5 Coleman’s Anti-Subject-Summing Argument..............................................................144
6.6 The Palette Problem.....................................................................................................146
6.7 The Structural Mismatch Problem................................................................................150
6.8 The Revelation Argument.............................................................................................154
6.9 Revelation and Phenomenal Confusion.......................................................................158
6.10 Cosmopsychism..........................................................................................................160
6.10.1 Priority Monism, Cosmopsychism, and Microphenomenality...........................162
6.10.2 Overcoming the Combination Problem Via Grounding by Subsumption?........163
6.11 The Limits of Phenomenal Combination....................................................................167
6.12 Structural Exclusion...................................................................................................167
6.13 Mørch's Phenomenal Powers Panpsychism...............................................................169
6.14 Impure Russellian Powers Panpsychism....................................................................171
6.15 A New Combination Problem.....................................................................................174
7 Emergence in Panpsychism..................................................................................................177
7.1 Non-Constitutive Versions of Panpsychism.................................................................177
7.1.1 Autonomous Panpsychism and Identity Panpsychism.........................................177
7.1.2 Emergent Panpsychism.........................................................................................179
7.2 Two Variants of Emergent Panpsychism......................................................................179
7.2.1 Against Fusionism................................................................................................180
7.2.2 Causal Emergent Panpsychism.............................................................................182
7.2.3 The Architecture of Emergent Macrophenomenality...........................................183
Excursus I: Macrointentions and Free Will........................................................................185
7.3 Solving the Causal Exclusion Problem........................................................................187
Contents vii
7.4 Pairing and Fundamental Interaction...........................................................................191
7.4.1 Categoricalism’s Intrinsic Dimension...................................................................193
7.4.2 Russellian Monism’s Two-Layered Intrinsic Dimension.....................................195
7.4.3 Phenomenal Emergence Within the Two-Layered Structure................................197
7.4.4 The Model’s Inapplicability to Emergent Dualism...............................................200
7.5 Solving the Problem of Structural Fit...........................................................................201
7.5.1 The Structural Mismatch Problem for Constitutive Russellian Panpsychism......201
7.5.2 The Problem of Structural Fit for Emergent Russellian Panpsychism.................203
7.5.3 An Evolutionary Explanation of Structural Fit.....................................................204
Excursus II: The Emergence Law......................................................................................206
8 Re-Evaluating the Antiphysicalist Options..........................................................................213
8.1 Mental Causation and Phenomenal Emergence...........................................................213
8.1.1 Microphenomenality and the Metaphysics of Dispositions..................................214
8.1.2 The Pairing and the Fundamental Interaction Problems.......................................214
8.1.3 The Causal Exclusion Problem.............................................................................216
8.2 The Prospects of Panpsychist Idealism........................................................................217
Bibliography............................................................................................................................223
List of Figures and Tables
Table 4.1: Taxonomy of Emergence 58
Table 4.2: Kinds of Entities According to Their Ontological Status (after Barnes 72
2012)
Table 4.3: Similarities and Differences Between Ordinary Causation and Emergence- 96
Causation
Table 5.1: Accounts of the Production of Macrophenomenality 103
Figure 7.1: Mental-to-Physical Downward Causation 189
Figure 7.2: Mental-to-Mental Downward Causation 189
Figure 7.3: Extrinsic and Intrinsic Dimensions in Constitutive Russellian Panpsychism 197
Figure 7.4: Extrinsic and Intrinsic Dimensions in Emergent Russellian Panpsychism 198
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, I should like to thank my primary supervisor, Thomas Sattig, who’s advice
was always both on the point and very precise, and simultaneously very constructive and en-
couraging. I have greatly benefited from his guidance, and from his constant reminders that
crazy views on consciousness must take particular care to remain compatible with widely ac-
cepted theories in other parts of philosophy. Moreover, having a supervisor who also special-
izes in metaphysics has proved to be very fruitful; Thomas has helped me to uncover links be-
tween topics in both the philosophy of mind and metaphysics which I would never have been
aware of without his counsel.
I would also like to thank my co-supervisor, Hong Yu Wong, who provided very helpful
comments on my thesis, especially in the initial stage of my project. Furthermore, I have
greatly benefited from the excellent articles on emergence and dualism which he published a
decade ago.
Very special thanks to Tobias Wilsch for extensive and thoughtful comments on various
drafts of two papers, the material of which also forms part of my dissertation, and for many
discussions from which I benefited greatly. I also owe thanks to my fellow PhD students,
Claudius Berger and Bahadır Eker, for valuable comments and discussions on various mate-
rial of this thesis.
During my PhD, I had the opportunity to participate in two masterclasses, led by David
Chalmers and Jonathan Schaffer respectively, presenting therein parts of my thesis. The mas-
terclass featuring David Chalmers was at the very beginning of my PhD It was tremendously
helpful to receive comments from one of the leading experts on panpsychism at such an early
stage: his positive feedback on my initial ideas greatly encouraged me to place trust in them
and to develop them further. At the masterclass with Jonathan Schaffer, I presented my cri-
tique of cosmopsychism, and greatly benefited from the comments of today’s leading propo-
nent of priority monism.
I am also grateful to many others for valuable comments on the materials of my thesis.
These include: Zach Blaesi, Philip Goff, Matteo Grasso, Blaine Kenneally, Micha Kieser,
Greg Miller, Garret Mindt, Hedda Hassel Mørch, Dan Pallies, Peter Rauschenberger, Hannah
Tomczyk, and the audiences at several talks which I gave in Budapest, Osnabrück, and Tübin-
gen respectively.
This work was made possible by the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, from which I received a
3-year doctoral scholarship. I also greatly benefited from the seminar program on political,
economic, and cultural topics which is part of the scholarship.
1 Introduction
Seeing a certain shade of violet, having a pleasant memory about one’s last holiday, and expe-
riencing sharp pain are all mental episodes accompanied by specific qualitative dimensions of
subjective experience, the often hard to describe what-it-feels-like-character of such mental
events. This character of subjective experience coinciding with mental states of which we are
aware while entertaining them is what philosophers call phenomenal consciousness. Someone
new to the debate might be surprised to hear that phenomenal consciousness has proved to be
one of the biggest mysteries in contemporary philosophy: the degree to which it is intimately
familiar to us is matched only by the degree to which it appears to resist our efforts to inte-
grate it into our theories of the natural world. At the heart of this conundrum lies the mind-
body problem, the question as to how a physical system such as the human brain can give rise
to phenomenal consciousness.
In the last couple of decades, there has been major progress in the philosophical debate on
the mind-body problem. But this progress to a lesser extend consisted of developing new
ways of explaining consciousness in terms of phenomena that we already know how to inte-
grate in our scientific theories such as certain sorts of neural activity in the brain; the view that
consciousness is thus explicable, physicalism, began to dominate the philosophical debate in
the 1950’s, and has remained influential ever since. Rather, the real progress since the 1980’s
has arguably consisted of taking consciousness seriously in its own right, and understanding
that it might very well be a fundamental, irreducible ingredient of the natural world—or so, at
least, has argued a growing number of participants within the current debate on conscious-
ness.
According to this narrative, which I myself endorse, important contributions by the likes
of Nagel (1974), Jackson (1982), Levine (1983), and Chalmers (1996) made us realize that
there is no straightforward way to explain consciousness in physical terms. Some theorists
such as Loar (1997), Hill (1997), Papineau (2002), and Balog (2012a) reacted by conceding
this point, but developed sophisticated ways of explaining as to why, although consciousness
resists straightforward reductive explanation in physical terms, it is nonetheless a physically
grounded phenomenon.1 Yet others, led by Jackson (1982) and Chalmers (1996), took those
antiphysicalist doubts at face value, and wondered how consciousness might fit into the natu-
ral world if it is a truly fundamental phenomenon possessing comparable metaphysical status
to fundamental physical properties such as mass, charge, and spin. This led to a revival of the
previously widely rejected doctrine of dualism, according to which there are both fundamental
physical properties and fundamental phenomenal properties without either being reducible to
the other.
Some dared to go even further: what, they asked, if it is the other way round to what we
originally thought? What if only consciousness is truly fundamental, while everything else is
1 Of course, many just outright demised these antiphysicalist reasonings. But from the perspective of the nar-
rative I am outlining here, these appear to be reactionary outsiders who were unable to revise their outdated
beliefs in the light of better arguments.
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive
license to Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE, part of Springer Nature 2020
F. Klinge, Panpsychism and the Emergence of Consciousness,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-62258-2_1