Panpsychism: Bad Science, Worse Philosophy

Annaka Harris' dismissal of the combination problem is a reflection of the shallowness of pop-panpsychist philosophy

Edvard Munch, The Lonely Ones (1899)

Panpsychism is creeping further into the public discourse around consciousness. The idea has been popularised for several years by Philip Goff, and is now being added to significantly by Annaka Harris, wife of arch new atheist Sam Harris, who has recently produced an audio documentary on the subject and is doing the standard podcast tour advocating for the position, or at least scientific openness to the position, that consciousness is fundamental to the matter of the universe.

Annaka Harris though is slightly different than Goff. Goff spends a sizeable chunk of his 2019 book Galileo’s Error railing against what he sees as the inherent failing of materialism to explain consciousness, which is a substantial part of his argument for why panpsychism is true. Yet Harris maintains that she is a materialist, and from her arguments it is evident that she has no interest in reconsidering the paradigm. The result (putting aside the fact that if a panpsychist is materialist we’ve lost all distinctions) is an attempt to simultaneously apply reductionism to the conscious self and somehow maintain its integral property without contradiction, an attempt that is perhaps predictably riddled with contradictions. She also thinks, unlike Goff who concedes that materialism and panpsychism are observationally equivalent, that this thesis can be investigated by science. Exactly how it seems is the scientist’s problem.

Harris’ argument is fairly simple: she came to the conclusion that if matter is not conscious, you cannot conceive of a point at which a state of matter becomes a state of conscious experience without making a claim that is nonsensical. Thus, if we are to explain consciousness, it must be part of the equation from the beginning: consciousness must be a fundamental or intrinsic property of matter. Matter is made of qualia.

This Panpsychism in theory according to its advocates resolves the seeming category problem of emergent consciousness from unconscious matter, yet it still leaves you with a secondary emergent problem which is known as the ‘combination problem.’ This asks how if the smallest fundamental elements of matter contain or are or have consciousness, how and why do they combine into the particular, structured, bounded and unified conscious experience that is contained within a brain and a self. William James put it:

Take a hundred of them [feelings], shuffle them and pack them as close together as you can (whatever that may mean); still each remains the same feeling it always was, shut in its own skin, windowless, ignorant of what the other feelings are and mean. There would be a hundred-and-first feeling there, if, when a group or series of such feelings were set up, a consciousness belonging to the group as such should emerge…

Herein lies the essential problem with panpsychism. Consciousness is particular, conscious experience relates to what it is like to be a subject experiencing everything that it is like to be you in this moment: light, sound, the feel of your body on the chair, the thoughts in your head, and all of this is unequivocally related to the complex structure of your brain. If we are claiming matter is conscious, composed of infinite and seperate qualia, how do they jumble together into a singularity, or how can we go in the opposite direction and imagine there is something it is like to be an electron as a subject of an experience?

Harris’ answer is that it’s easy, an electron doesn’t need to be a subject of experience, because you are not a subject of experience.

The Self that doesn’t exist

Annaka Harris has the same basic position on the self which anyone who knows the work of Sam Harris will be familiar with, as she puts it:

The deeper sense of self is the experience of being a single, independently existing entity that has a precise centre or location and is doing the experiencing…this concept of the self is an illusion.¹

Harris believes that it is this central illusion that motivates the combination problem, and that the belief in the distinction between experience, as opposed to just seeing reality as a infinite conscious experiences bubbling into existence, is the basic impediment to panpsychism:

I believe that this way of framing things is entirely due to the experience of self, which we know to be an illusion. All we truly know is that content (or qualia) appears in the universe. The claim that qualia appear to a subject in the universe is an additional (and I think unnecessary and false) step. The most powerful sense in which there is an experience of ‘I’ or ‘me’ as a single entity to which certain experiences are presented is through the connection of experienced moments of qualia through memory. If I simply experienced green and then sharp pain and then happiness and then bright light, without memory causing these qualia to trail along, there would be no sense in which we would say this is happening to ‘me’ or to a subject at all. We would just say that qualia are appearing in the universe — like bubbles in a pot of boiling water. There is no subject that this content is appearing to. It’s just appearing. And each quale, by definition, is always limited to that specific quale.

Her argument then is that because the sense of being an organised subject is illusory, the problem of combination goes away. Consciousness is not a singular experience but an illusion created by memory, by the false belief that I have continued existence moment to moment, and that some changing changelessness remains at the centre of my consciousness. Harris argues that if reality is just made of qualia, then your experience may feel like its an organised and centralised experience, but actually it’s just another bunch of qualia you erroneously think are conjoined into a unity, and in reality my and your qualia are not separated by any boundary:

In terms of privacy, when we realize that there is no solid centre we can label ‘you’ or ‘me’, it makes no sense to talk about where my consciousness ends and yours begins. Content is arising, and some of that content is shared across time through memory, as yet more content. Your perception of yellow isn’t ‘yours’. It’s simply an experience of yellow arising in the universe, derived from interacting forces and fields. It’s not private in the typical sense. There is no self for it to be private for.

She goes on:

The experience of a human brain is largely one of confusing consciousness with the experience of self, and we run into a combination problem only when we drag the concept of a ‘self’ or a ‘subject’ into the equation. The solution to the combination problem is that no ‘combining’ at all is going on with respect to consciousness itself. Consciousness could persist as is, while the character and content changes depending on the arrangement of the specific matter in question. In my analogy to the pot of boiling water, the bubbles are the content, and the water is consciousness. Maybe content is sometimes shared across large, intricately connected regions and sometimes confined to very small ones, perhaps even overlapping. If two human brains were connected to each other, both people might feel as if the content of their consciousness had simply expanded, with each person feeling a continuous transformation from the content of one person’s consciousness to the whole of the two, until the connection was more or less complete. It’s only when you insert the concepts of ‘him’, ‘her’, ‘you’, and ‘me’ as discrete entities that the expanding or merging of content becomes a combination problem.

Why this is wrong and irrelevant anyway

This sweeping dismissal of self asks us to leap frog one patently obvious fact: that I or Annaka or anyone can talk about consciousness. The only consciousness that you and I experience is a consciousness cohered into a unity. While philosophers break down the word ‘qualia’ as an abstraction, the idea that independant quale exist outside of their place in some organised state of consciousness within a brain is a claim that requires far more evidence than “oh the self is an illusion,” especially since any argument that employs the word illusion comes across as motivated.

After all, if we imagine reality at large to be composed of unnumbered qualia coming in and out of existence, as Harris says we should, in what sense can we describe the ‘experience’ of those qualia as existing? They would be independant of any attention, infinitesimal in duration since they they would be unretained in memory and therefore inseparable from what we would by almost any definition understand as unconscious.

Indeed I think Annaka’s case is actually a better own-goal argument for illusionism than it is for panpsychism. By arguing the essential unity or meta-consciousness of conscious experience is illusory and has no ontological status, she is dependant on the existence of qualia as independant ontological realities within a conscious field, but if we imagine that all of our retention, organisation and thus perception of those qualia is illusory, how is that seperate from arguing that the qualia themselves are illusory?

No, of course socks are not conscious, stupid

Annaka begins this paper in the Journal of Consciousness Studies from which the above is taken by making what she seems to think is a clear distinction of the obvious fact between talking about consciousness as a fundamental property of matter and talking about something like a rock, a moon or a tree having consciousness, the latter of which she claims is apparently obviously false:

We should be careful not to reflexively rail against the idea that rocks and spoons are conscious, which is obviously false when put in terms of a rock’s being conscious as a rock. If consciousness is fundamental, all matter must entail consciousness by definition; but that doesn’t mean it makes sense to specify such things as ‘moon consciousness’ and ‘tree consciousness’. We would expect that the region of space-time occupied by a rock, say, entails consciousness because matter is present there. We can’t imagine what that region of particles feels like (or even that it has a unified perspective at all, which seems unlikely). What we can be fairly sure of, however, is that it doesn’t contain a human-like experience or even a single ‘point of view’. Just as we wouldn’t expect (the collection of atoms that make up) a rock to get up and walk or sing — that’s not what atoms configured in such a way do — we wouldn’t expect it to have a single, unified point of view. And we certainly wouldn’t expect it to have anything like thoughts or intentions.

It’s worth emphasising that this initial claim is key to Philip Goff’s argument as well, Goff is quick to emphasise in his book Galileo’s Error that panpsychism obviously doesn’t mean a sock is conscious, only that it contains elemental consciousness as all matter does. It’s as if this has to be quickly established as a way of quelling the idea that it might sound mad.

This plays on and indeed relies on ‘common sense’ rather than argument or evidence, which is ironic because the claim that elemental matter is conscious is precisely the opposite, it claims to offer explanation by being counterintuitive, in other words it seems to violate common sense.

But historically the intuition that objects as a whole possess consciousness is far more common. Just because you assume today that, duh, of course the moon isn’t conscious, that doesn’t mean such an assumption is universally intuitive. For example various ancient philosophers saw planets and stars as angelic intelligences, their orbits the result of a kind of celestial intentionality, and the idea that angels and conscious agency were essential to the workings of the universe is foundational to some of our basic formulations of reality, as weird as it sounds.²

Back to the Self

The apparent obviousness that the moon or a tree is not conscious but your brain is requires a clear assertion that there is something different about your mind than there is to a sock or a banana or a deodorant can. If I get punched in the arm I feel pain, if a meteorite hits the moon, we assume the moon does not feel pain or sadness or irritation because, well, it’s the moon. But by Annaka’s definition there is no reason why it should be different. If conscious experiences in the brain and body are not relying on combination at some higher order level or dependant on the nervous system, then either all experiences would be undifferentiated or any object with emergent properties explainable with classical physics could have some unified conscious property.

Again, this just relies on unsaid common sense distinctions that arbitrarily assert that I feel pain if I get kicked in the head but a football doesn’t feel impact if I kick it, but no such justification for these distinctions have been provided. Let’s say that we reject the previous claim of illusionism but accept that the self is not an essential ontological category, it is still an organised higher unity that is seemingly unlike any other category of thing, whose properties unequivocally rely upon reifying the apparently infinitesimal qualia that compose the field of consciousness into a mind capable of memory, attention and awareness. In other words, consciousness is arguably only real when it is part of a compositional self, and becomes more real to the degree that said self is properly unified and functioning.

Then there is the clear problem that conscious experience is of phenomena related to the sensory apparatus of the human body. The combination problem is actually a basic problem in neuroscience, the open question of how when I look a person, the aspects of colour, movement, facial recognition, all of which are processed in different areas of the brain, cohere into a single unified conscious experience. Harris suggests that conscious experiences exist everywhere continuously coming in and out of being, are “extraordinary minimal” and of which “I couldn’t even imagine but having to come up with an analogy, the feeling you have when you’ve walked across a carpet and you get an electrical shock. That feeling with no memory no body, that is what those things are at bottom.”³

You can hardly rely on the intuition that the idea the moon is conscious is too ridiculous to consider when you are claiming that what it feels like to be an electron is carpet burn. In fact all you can really rely on is the credulity of your audience because this makes no sense. Carpet burn is a piece of sense information in a human body. Why it should be conscious, and how that conscious experience is ontologically compatible with any physicalist description of the matter of my brain is obviously a significant problem, but Annaka’s theory complicates the problem by suggesting that said experiences can exist outside of the only processes in which we have ever found them, chopped up from the whole in which we experience them. The claim that there are infinite fleeting experiences that make up reality is nonsensical, unfalsifiable, unjustifiable, not logically salient, philosophically illiterate, and violates the most basic observations about where and how we encounter what conscious experience is.

What requires explanation then is not just the apparent category error at the root of the distinction between matter and consciousness, but a conception of what consciousness is that explains the formal content of consciousness, that explains why consciousness seems to be transcendental in a Kantian sense, why the qualia of our minds are organised in the way that we are. The arguments of panpsychists such as Harris and Goff get far enough to observe that materialism has some catagory problems at its root, yet all they do is essentially invert it into a photo negative in which all of the same problems persist. What remains is a kind of mereological nihilism that explains nothing of the formal coherence of our minds. Idealism would at least claim to ground form and perception, and would challenge not just the incoherent ontology of materialism but the reductionism of it. If you want a philosophy that rejects the flaws of materialism, you can’t cling to its framework. Whoever you is.

1. This and subsequent quotes: Harris, A Solution to the Combination Problem and the Future of Panpsychism, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 28, No. 9–10, 2021, pp. 129–40

2. See: https://aeon.co/essays/why-physics-today-stands-on-the-wings-of-angels-and-demons

3. Alex O’Connor’s YouTube: - Is Consciousness Fundamental? - Annaka Harris