Ep. 218: The Hard Problem of Consciousness (Chalmers, et al) (Part Two)

0:00 Mark: remainder of our discussion of this Chalmers paper. We at least have to get out the different types of materialism, the different types of dualism, et cetera, that he lays out.

0:08 Gregory: Well, I guess the most obvious one to start with and the most natural is to start with A. And that's type A materialism. And this is what historically people might have called a priori materialism or a priori physicalism. And the easiest way to understand this view is just to say, well, all those arguments that Chalmers gives where you move from an epistemic claim about the epistemic gap between the physical and consciousness, they just deny that that gap exists. Right. So the a priori physicalist or the type A materialist says, well, no, when Mary is in her room, if she reads enough neuroscience and in enough detail and with the correct scientific theory, she does know what it's like to see red when she leaves the room.

She doesn't learn anything new, she doesn't have a new fact. Or they might say zombies are inconceivable. If I have the proper concept of a thing that is identical to me, wholly physically identical to me, then I can't have that thing lacking conscious experience. And likewise they say, well, when it comes to the kind of, of explanatory gap argument explaining the structure and function in that much detail and with the right theory does entail facts about consciousness. So pain is identical to C fibres is just as clear and is just as transparent, let's say, as water is H2O.

That's the idea.

1:41 Mark: So, yeah, like with the knowledge argument, she clearly has a different experience when she leaves a room. But the type A materialist is going to have to say she doesn't learn a different fact. That's just not what facts are. Facts are just about physical things and, you know, you can have many experiences of the same physical fact. It's just, you know, you're looking at it from a different angle or whatever, but you're not necessarily learning any new facts.

2:03 Wes: One form of this, according to Chalmers, is just that consciousness does not exist and there are no phenomenal truths and they're just reducible. You could reduce it to behaviors and logical behaviorism, or you could be an analytical functionalist. I think Ryle fits in here somewhere. But in the end you just agree that, as he puts it, having the functional capacities to access, report control and the like, that just is what consciousness is. And there's nothing over and above that.

2:32 Dylan: Yeah, and he points out often this debate, whether or not you're a type A materialist just comes down to an intuition regarding consciousness. That type A material is just. They deny what we've been talking about for the whole podcast, that there exists a hard problem. They deny that that exists.

2:47 Wes: They are zombies, they have no souls.

2:50 Mark: Deny that it matters. I think is more common. You know, the idea that, well, if a robot passes the Turing test, we're just going to treat it as intelligent. Right. In other words, if it can tell us it's intelligent, if it can act intelligent, then we're going to just assume that it is intelligent. And we were going to say intelligent, that that term is sufficient to Cover anything. We would want to cover consciousness.

3:10 Wes: We can make inferences. It's that logically, consciousness is actually reducible to those dispositions to make certain kinds of verbal reports, for instance. It's not like we're doing a Turing Test and saying, oh, can we infer from the verb? I mean, it leads to implications for that maybe, but.

3:26 Gregory: Yeah, yeah, precisely.

3:28 Mark: So type B materialism, it's not saying that in the definition, it's not a priori that the mental is the physical, but we can discover that, just like we discover the example that Greg gave before was that water is in fact H2O. You wouldn't know that just by shaking glass around and looking at it. But through science, we can discover that phenomenal properties are in fact brain states and that all we need to do is look at the correlations and look at the fact that if you get smacked in the head, then that'll affect your vision in certain ways. If you drink beer, then that'll affect your thinking in certain ways. Like all these correlations are all over the place. And that's what would make somebody become a type of B materialist.

4:09 Dylan: Chalmers says that even with that kind of identity, you're saying that I'm going to be able to come up with this explanation, but he says that you're not going to be able to give a kind of gene like physicalist explanation. You're going to have to have some significant development in what you mean by a material explanation to do this.

4:28 Gregory: Yeah, he thinks that although the type B materialist might say that the identity, for instance, between my experience of pain and a C fiber, is this a posteriori one, it does appear to be quite different in kind to the water is H2O. Because he thinks once you've got all the facts about water and facts about H2O, you could deduce that identity if you weren't told they were identical. Right. So I give you all the facts about H2O, give you all the facts about water. I don't tell you they're identical, but you could deduce that identity from the two sets of facts.

Whereas the a posteriori identity between pain and C fibers. Right. If I gave you all the facts about those, he says, you couldn't deduce that identity. You couldn't figure that out a priori. So he says the identity is epistemically primitive, is what he says. And he says the only way to get around that is like Dylan said by, like maybe trying to reconceive certain sides of that Identity relation.

5:29 Mark: We should explain a little. What is it to say that it's epistemically primitive according to the type B materialist, when we've just said it's the type A materialist, who says a priori. In other words, what I mean, whether I know it or not, what I mean by mind has to just be some activities of motion and structure. It has to be some activities of the brain. Some activities.

5:50 Wes: Well, it's a posteriori. It's empirically. You discover this empirically. In the case of the type B material, it's not.

5:56 Mark: You discover it for the type B you discovered empirically. But yet, Greg, isn't that what you just said, that it becomes epistemically primitive?

6:03 Gregory: If you think about this like so we find out a posteriori that water is identical to H2O, right? We find that out by looking into the world. But once we know that identity, right, what we could do is get all the facts about both sides of the identity relation and we could in fact figure out that they were identical, right? So imagine we didn't find out there was an identity, but for some reason, by the grace of God, we were given all the micro level facts about H2O and all the macro level facts about water. We could see that identity. Chalmers claims we would notice that it'd be a thing we found out by finding out a posteriori facts about those types of stuff.

But once we had all that, we could see that there was a connection. Whereas with pain and C fibers or, you know, any other kind of mind, brain identity, we wouldn't be able to see that in that same way it wouldn't be something you could deduce from just the set of facts alone. It wouldn't be clear or obvious or something like that.

7:06 Wes: Another way to get at it is we can say certain properties of water. We can give these accounts where we say, why say, when water is frozen, what that looks like at the molecular state and there are clear causal connections. In a way you say, oh, the molecules are doing this and then that's why we get frozenness at the macro level, it's epistemically primitive for consciousness because there are no accounts like that. You're just setting up rote correlations between things. And you never can go into any finer detail about why such and such is correlated to such and such. With water, you're getting into these descriptions which make it clear why such and such is correlated to such and such. Look, the molecules are doing this and therefore it's frozen.

7:50 Mark: That's A little misleading that there's quite a lot of detail while still being within the realm of easy problem explanations that you could give about the correlation. It's not just as simple as whenever C fibers fire, then you feel pain. There's going to be a whole structural, detailed thing about the brain that is going to. Well, are there certain conditions that make it so pain is deadened? You know, when we give you an anesthetic, that would be an example of a detail of, okay, pain is still C fibers firing. But if we deliver this anesthetic to you, then that has this effect specifically on the C fibers, which in turn has the effect on the pain. I don't know if that works so much that adds any wrinkle to it being C fibers.

8:33 Wes: Well, we already need the epistemically primitive relationship between the pain and C fibers before you do that. But. But anyway, there might be objections to this point of view if you think

8:43 Gregory: about it as an identity between the two things. Even though we're told it's an identity. Right. Even though we're told Bob Dylan is Robert Zimmerman. When we're told those two things just doesn't seem obvious. Right. And that's the claim. Whereas if you are told that water is H2O and it's an a priori identity, oh, we go, oh, yeah, of course it is. Yeah. Look, it's clear we can understand why. But when you're told about pain equals this brain state, it just seems equally as, like really equally as mysterious. Even though you're told they're identical.

9:17 Dylan: Yeah. What's interesting about that is it's a really a distinction in the characteristics of identities. So you have a kind of identity which is a mere equation that just says A is B and it's a kind of placeholder, a symbol. You know, it's like saying computer equals love or something like that. And in the other one, there's something about the characteristic of either side of the identity that is manifest in the other side. So that there's an explanatory power in that.

9:46 Mark: So it's not primitive, right?

9:47 Dylan: Yep.

9:48 Mark: Just to finish this off, let me just read the quote from Chalmers. So we get the official way of putting this on page 15. There's something unique about the case of consciousness. We can put this by saying that while identity between genes and DNA is empirical, it is not epistemically primitive. The identity is itself deducible from the complete physical truth about the world. Right. So being not primitive means you can deduce it.

10:09 Gregory: No no, no, that's why it's a badly written sentence. Being epistemically primitive means it isn't deducible. If you read that little quote, it's really confusing because he puts in italics epistemically primitive. He says not epistemically primitive such that you think he's going to define it, but he doesn't. He puts epistemically primitive in italics and then defines that. I had to read that a few times, I was like, what is he doing? Yeah, it's really confusing.

10:35 Mark: By contrast, the type B materialist must hold that the identification between consciousness and physical or functional states is epistemically primitive. The identity is not deducible from the complete physical truth. If it were deducible, type A materialism would be true instead. So the identity between consciousness and a physical state will be a sort of primitive principle in one's theory of the world. So determining whether that's weird, I think, you know, this is something we're not going to be able to solve here. And I don't think he solves it well in this paper that he just dwells on like are there primitive identities elsewhere in physics? And Chalmers says no, so this is weird, we should just rule this out.

11:11 Wes: No, there are lots of primitive, not primitive identities, but sorry, laws. The laws of physics are, there are lots of primitives. So elsewhere, the only sort of place that one finds this sort of primitive principle is in the fundamental laws of physics. Gravitation does what it does and you don't have an explanation for it.

11:26 Dylan: Gravity is a bad example actually because of space time curvature.

11:31 Wes: Right. But anyway, but yeah, ultimately you expect to get to some brute facts about the world which are inexplicable in another way. But yeah, what he's objecting to are primitive identities, not primitive laws. And so yeah, you effectively reduce this connection to a law of just, hey, it's a basic law of nature. The brain states do this, which I

11:51 Mark: think that's what people that are doing research on the so called easy problems, that's kind of the take that they have that, you know, they're just things. I, I think when we talk to Owen Flanagan, this was kind of his take that look when you're starting out looking into an area like this, you know, you want to know what consciousness is. You have grand expectations. Well, in the course of doing research you kind of change your expectations. And so he is satisfied with these solutions to the so called easy problems, like just learning, you know, being able to hook somebody up to A machine that measures their brain waves and seeing how that what the actual fact that we in philosophy, caricature as pain is equal to C fibers.

You know, when we do this, like, does meditation help you? This is what we were talking Flanagan about. You know that just knowing those neurological facts is tremendously enlightening. And you just stop expecting the brute identity between pain and C fibers, between any mental state and any physical state to be further explained. You just get details about the correlation, but you don't get an ultimately an explanation of what the correlation amounts to. You don't solve the hard problem and you just kind of shrug and say, well, okay, that's the limits of what science can do here.

13:02 Gregory: That's above my pay grade, so to speak. Yeah. And the next positions are all dualists, basically, aren't they? Now, Chalmers mentions type C materialism, and that's kind of like the view that we can hold out for some as yet unconceived explanation to the problem. But Chalmer says, well, this just collapses into all the other views that I've so far looked at. So then he moves on to the two types of kind of dualism that have been historically popular. Right? Type D and type E dualism.

13:36 Wes: Yeah. So we're Moving to page 29 here. Type D dualism. D for Descartes,

13:45 Mark: aka interactionism.

13:47 Gregory: Yes, interactionism, yeah.

13:49 Wes: So these two fundamental sorts of things in the world, and they causally interact and one of them is mind stuff, one of them is matter. But there is also, he says, property dualism, which there's just one substance. Right. The Cartesian version would be there's two substances, but you might say, well, there's just one substance and it just has both physical and phenomenal fundamental properties. So this sort of interactionism that he's describing could be that as well.

14:13 Mark: I think that turns out to be type F monism. I think he specifically says, like, if you think like Spinoza, that there is only one underlying substance, but there's a dualism of properties about it, that it's still metaphysical monism.

14:27 Wes: I'm not sure because the causation stuff, but what he says in the text is, but this sort of view is also compatible with property dualism, on which there is just one sort of substance or entity with both physical and phenomenal fundamental properties, such that the phenomenal properties play an irreducible role in affecting the physical properties. I'm not sure if that squares with monism, that affecting the physical properties part. I don't think it does.

14:52 Mark: Yeah. Again, I think we Just have to read a whole paper on property dualism to really decide this either way.

14:57 Wes: So he brings up broad's emergentism and so you basically you can have upward and downward causation between the mental and the microphysical and all that. So I think it's more specific than monism.

15:09 Gregory: So you might think of type F monism as a type of property dualism that links the relationship between the physical and the phenomenal a little bit more closely. It's a tighter snugger fit. Right. Because type E dualism says when physical stuff is so arranged like brain wise, we get this new phenomenal stuff, phenomenal properties. The type F monist. You meant type Type D. No, that's what the type E dualist says as well.

15:38 Mark: Oh, okay.

15:38 Gregory: The type D dualist says when we arrange stuff brain wise, we get immaterial substances and immaterial properties. The Type E dualist says when we arrange stuff brain wise, we just get immaterial properties. Now the difference with type F monism and which Chalmers here calls Russellian monism and this kind of taken big resurgence over the last few years and this is what part of my thesis was on and this is what I research on. And then this says like the relationship between the physical and the phenomenal is much closer than the type E dualist would have you believe. They say, well actually phenomenal properties are the intrinsic nature of matter, so to speak. It's what breathes fire into the equation. So it kind of says, well look, in a weird way that kind of mental stuff plays the more fundamental role and the physical stuff kind of supervenes or comes out of it.

16:32 Wes: Yeah.

16:33 Dylan: So the type D dualism we have these two categories, phenomenal properties and physical properties, and they interact with one another, but they're fundamentally dual, but they go back and forth. Phenomenal can affect the physical and the physical can affect the phenomenal. In type E dualism we have phenomenological properties that are ontologically distinct from physical properties, but they can't affect physical properties. So that could be a kind of emergence that doesn't have downward causality that you have.

17:02 Wes: Yeah. So epiphenomenalism.

17:04 Dylan: Yep, epiphenomenalism.

17:06 Mark: Can I just point? So often cited in support of epiphenomenalism is I can't remember the exact research study. I think we might have talked about it in the latest Eva Brann interview on Will where you know, somebody's making a decision to point to a spot or something like that and you time when they report having made the decision versus like, basically their hand is already moving to point to the spot before they report having made the decision to move to the spot. So the idea there is that decision making and things is actually just happening.

Even though I said earlier on in the discussion that whenever I attribute to you that you move your hand to take the ice cream or whatever, I attribute to some mental, like a desire for the ice cream, that, that just like we were talking at the beginning, is actually not essential. It's actually shown by neuroscience that. No, no, it's actually the thinking that you have a desire for the thing is like an after effect is not essential for the causal mechanism of you reaching for it at all. It's just a byproduct. So all consciousness, our whole mental life as individual humans, is maybe just kind of a accidental, unknown, unnecessary offshoot.

Maybe we're just the exhaust pipe. But everything that's actually producing our behavior, including our speaking behavior and thinking behavior, is happening under the level of consciousness.

18:21 Wes: Which makes sense. Right. Because the interactionist idea is weird. It's weird to say, okay, I have this brain state which corresponds to this mental state, and then the mental state is going to come back down and cause the next brain state. You know, it's just brain state to brain state. That's what's happening causally. We know that. Does that make sense? I mean.

18:41 Gregory: Yeah. So Chalmers objects to this though, doesn't he? Chalmers says, well, look, I mean, that's what people always say to the interactionist dualist. But for instance, if you're a Humean about causation, then you've only got constant conjunction.

18:55 Dylan: Right.

18:55 Gregory: And so in the picture we have that says brain state followed by brain state. Nothing about that rules out brain state, immaterial state, brain state. You might think that's a kind of overly technical and a bit of a sneaky way to get out of the argument. But then that is what actual kind of Cartesian dualists typically say.

19:13 Dylan: Right?

19:14 Wes: Interesting.

19:15 Gregory: Yeah.

19:16 Dylan: And what would keep phenomenal states from affecting phenomenal states?

19:20 Gregory: Oh, so rather than going via another brain state.

19:24 Dylan: Yeah.

19:25 Gregory: My guess is the dualist to kind of maintain some degree of plausibility. Right. Says, well, look, we have laws of nature that link brain states with immaterial states and vice versa. And that seems the most plausible just to have the constant kind of link between them. If we had this other thing, law, like relations between immaterial states, then you'd have this overly complicated picture. Now, that doesn't answer your question. Right.

19:52 Wes: They could go off on their own Separate tracks as well. How do they track each other?

19:56 Gregory: Precisely. So that doesn't really answer the question. It just, they say, oh, it seems more plausible this way. But your point is.

20:02 Wes: Well, why, if we do think there's causal relationships between the phenomenal states, they have to correspond to causal relationships between the material states. Because if they didn't, they could do something that doesn't track the causal relationships between the material states. But it's a weird way of talking about cause. We're almost thinking about what supervenes on cause. So if we think that my feeling of hunger for a piece of pizza caused my crying or sadness when I couldn't get it. Something like that. Well, yeah, I mean, as I said in the very beginning, I think that is a legitimate causal explanation in a sense within that domain of explanation. But it has to correspond to a causal explanation which some brain state led to another which led to a behavior.

20:50 Mark: I mean, of course the dualist historically is supposed to leave open the idea that your mind could then leave your body and there would be all sorts of strictly mind to mind causal connections that have no brain correspondence. Right?

21:01 Gregory: Yeah, yeah, that's true, yeah.

21:03 Wes: Mind on mind action.

21:04 Mark: And it would be very strange if while you're alive, the way that one thought causes another thought is by the thought causes something in the brain to move which causes something else in the brain to move, which then pings up and causes another thought. That there was this complicated chain when we are embodied creature. But then after we die and the soul flies off, then there's just direct causation. That would be extra weird.

21:26 Gregory: Yeah, that's really good point actually. Yeah.

21:28 Mark: I mean Chalmers is not really concerned with that kind of dualism or those reasons for holding dualism. I looked a little bit at this CD broad book on emergentism and it looked really fascinating and like much more fun to read than any of what we're reading here from the early 20th century. So that might be something we could turn to in the future to see what emergentism as a type of dualism comes to. Because that sounds much more plausible to a modern scientific mind than the idea of there being basic fundamental spiritual substance in the world and basic fundamental physical substance in the world and somehow these interact.

If the idea is that no, when you get enough physical stuff together, somehow there's a different level of explanation, the mental that emerges out of that that is just in no way reducible. Not theoretically, not practically, not in any way. So that we might as well, if we're doing a metaphysics Cause at a different level of substance that at least sounds in the abstract like something that I want to learn more about. Whereas these old Cartesian ways like. No, no, those seem dead.

22:27 Wes: A lot of this, by the way, came up in Lucretius. We didn't discuss it that much, but there's a lot of really interesting emergentist type stuff going on in Lucretius, and we could relate it back to them.

22:37 Dylan: Well, and in fact, type F monism, right, in which you have intrinsic properties embodied in the individual elements of the universe, Right?

22:44 Wes: Well, yeah. So should we quickly again say what type F monism is? Where there's a. What it's like to be for everything.

22:50 Gregory: Right, this is true, yeah. So in the kind of contemporary literature, and Chalmers says this, he says we might call this view Russellian monism because it takes its cue from Russell's description of physics in the analysis of matter. And the view here is that earlier when we talked about the explanatory gap and the arguments, etcetera, Physics gives us a really particular type of description of the nature of matter. It tells us what matter does, Right. It describes matter in terms of dispositions. But you might think, well, if all there is to matter is dispositions, dispositions seem too ghostly a type of entity to constitute fundamental stuff, right?

So the type F monist says, well, look, we have this hard problem of consciousness, right? How do I fit intrinsic phenomenal properties into my picture of the world? Well, down there at my fundamental level, we have this kind of gap that needs filling. We need something that's not dispositional, we need something that's intrinsic. So they say, plug in these phenomenal properties down there and you get what Chalmers calls a kind of panpsychism or pan proto psychism, right? You might think of it as like a dual aspect sort of view of the nature of matter, something like that.

That's the idea.

24:07 Wes: We saw this in Leibniz's monadology, of course, where Leibniz is also making a connection, interestingly enough, to this innerness of monads and kinetic energy. And I think even in Schopenhauer, the idea of the sort of fundamental inwardness of things being willing, that's a variation on this. If you spend any time thinking about the problem of consciousness, it's sort of one natural avenue to explore, because it does seem like an interesting way out. Instead of getting the situation where, oh, it's everything is matter or there's this consciousness and they're radically different and how do you join them together?

You Just say, well, look, yeah, everything has this inwardness. And then it's a matter of when we talk about human consciousness just, just summing all the parts together, because obviously a proton is not going to be conscious or there's not going to be what it's like to be a proton in the same sense as there's what it's like to be a human being. And so we have to try and say, well, what do we mean then by what it's like to be? That's different. And then how does that summation work? Does it actually even help us to say that there are these proto phenomenal qualities?

Maybe it doesn't even help us, but I think it's a very natural avenue to explore.

25:23 Dylan: So reading that bit made me think of an account of this famous particle physicist, Richard Feynman, who was attributed to him that part of the reason that he was so good at physics and so able to develop quantum electrodynamics was that he actively thought about what it was like to be an electron. Which is also interesting because he is also famously anti philosopher. But that's the way he approached doing physics. And the fact is, we've mentioned this before, is that even while simultaneously denying that I don't really mean that I want to talk about the Earth wants to be closer to the moon or any of that kind of intrinsic property activity that it's routinely the way in which scientists think about things having activity is that you think about, you know, an electron wants to be closer to that proton and so therefore it's going closer to it, that kind of thing.

26:20 Wes: Yeah. And this reminds me of pre Socratics, you might want to say it's all love and strife in the end, right? It's all attractive forces and repulsive forces. And maybe there is something to say, well, at the very least we know, right? All those attractive and repulsive forces ultimately add up to our subjective feeling of being aversive or attracted to, which is a big part of what consciousness is. And maybe there is something to the idea that even when a subatomic particle is exhibiting that behavior, that is a proto version of what it means to be attracted or repulsed. As strange as it sounds, I agree.

26:58 Dylan: And one of the ways I think about it is that on one end you have this idea that you have lots of things in physics. You have electrons and protons that are in something else, in all these ontological objects that are interacting with one another. And then this view seems to say that, well, what you really have is you have all these Entities that have a way of being and that everything that you see is a result of their way of being bumping up against one another. So the interactions really aren't between them. They aren't between things that are, I'll call it, relatively inert. They are a consequence of the internal activity of each of those individual ontological entities. So the outside comes as a result of the inside. I'm being very abstract there.

27:45 Gregory: Yeah, yeah. That is historically the way that these things are conceived. Right. So the kind of inner nature somehow is responsible for its outward manifestation or something like that.

27:55 Wes: Representation follows, Will.

27:57 Gregory: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

27:58 Mark: We have Greg on here. Let's take maximum advantage of the fact that you did this work in panpsychism. So there are things that Chalmers refers to, both in the interactionism section and in the type F monism section, about quantum states. And this is kind of what I'd heard. Maybe it's Fodor's current view or, you know, his later view, where somehow, if you want to say that consciousness is a fundamental property of matter, even though that's not what our physics looks like right now. Well, there are weird ways that you can bend quantum physics to.

I mean, we've done our philosophy of physics episode, the first one Dylan was ever on, where the Schrodinger's cat. The idea that consciousness enters at the time we're making a measurement of the position of an elementary particle. And people often point at that as like, look, consciousness is involved right there in basic physics. But I think I've heard lots of dismissive responses of that, and I have no idea how this Fodor book fits in with any of that. Greg, is that something you looked into in writing your thing on panpsychism?

29:01 Gregory: Yeah. So there's a difference there between the two views. I think that's kind of what Chalmers is thinking of as some sort of interactionist dualism where phenomenal properties play a role in the physical world. And one of the places it seems a kind of natural fit for these phenomenal properties to play as a role is actually in collapsing the wave function. Right. So we usually think that wave functions collapse when there is a measurement. And it looks like, according to Chalmers, the only sense we can have of what it means to be a measurement is to be observed by a conscious observer.

Right. Or observed by a conscious agent. So that's one view. Now, the type F monist view that says there's kind of a fundamental role for phenomenal properties within physics doesn't say it's a sort of Interaction like that, from like a, you know, macro level brain like phenomenal properties to quantum level superposed states. There's none of this. What the type F monist says is like that phenomenal properties are the intrinsic nature of matter and they kind of ground all those interactions in the first place. So they're kind of distinct views.

Now, I'm not sure exactly how the problem develops, but Chalmers has a problem. And Chalmers along with a guy called Kelvin McQueen work on this kind of interactionist quantum collapse sort of view of dualism. And they say that if panpsychism is true, right? Or some sort of type F monism where consciousness is the intrinsic nature of matter and to observe is to interact with a conscious property, then chalmers and Kelvin McQueen call it the quantum Zeno effect, right? And they say something like this, and correct me if any of you know much more about physics than I do, but they say you would never get a proper development of a kind of matter and objects etc through time because things would always collapse.

You would never have any kind of real progression, because from the very instant of the Big Bang, they say, right? If phenomenal properties were there instantly collapsing everything they interacted with, then you would have no development. So they say, in fact, the development of the world and the actual superposition of actual quantum phenomena imply the falsity of type F monism. I think this is the claim, but I'm not going to super in on that argument.

31:28 Dylan: So that makes wave collapse a kind of epiphenomenal effect. It sounds like it makes wave collapse radically human, right? Radically perceptual, rather than only analogically perceptual. So the way I would have thought about that before is that wave collapse, when we talk about measurement, we really talk about a kind of instantiation that realizes something. So that I formally have a complicated wave function of superposition of states, just like I do in the universe as this one big wave function. But. But I have, as it's called as a practical matter, there are parts of the wave function that are much stronger than other parts of the wave function.

And so I have a moon that's distinct from the Earth. The way in which it's a quantum superposed state is not just a consequence of the fact that I looked at the Moon and looked at the Earth. It's something intrinsic to their physicality without me looking at it, right? There's a moon and an Earth out there that aren't quantumly superimposed. Whether there's a person there to be in the forest to look at.

32:38 Gregory: Them I have the feeling and I could be completely wrong, but they on the side that would say in fact no, they're only not superimposed when they're observed. So the moon and whatever are superimposed until you look at them and now they're no longer superimposed.

32:56 Dylan: That's a version of the. There's no sound of the trees in the forest unless there's someone there to hear it.

33:01 Gregory: I think that is the kind of thing they're putting forward. But they also think in putting the fact of certain phenomena entail the falsity of type F monism.

33:10 Dylan: I'd have to read more about it to understand why other aspects of quantum interpretation, decoherence and stuff like that where you end up having other methods of getting individual entities that aren't quantum mechanically entailed at a deep level and how you deal with just the fact that those quantum mechanical effects that we talk about. It's actually really hard to get them to happen in a macroscopic way. We know that atoms rely, that atoms and substances. Yes, quantum mechanics is happening all the time. But the things that are manifest about quantum mechanics like nonlocality and superposition of states. There's a reason why we didn't come across it until the 20th century and are doing spectral analysis in the 19th century and stuff like that that people didn't think of this kind of superposition of states. It's because it's macroscopically doesn't happen.

34:05 Gregory: Yeah. I don't know how they cash out the rest of the work on this, but if any listeners want to, you know, or you guys want to read it. I think the paper is called something like Consciousness and Quantum Collapse. And there's a very good chalmers. There's a good talk on it on YouTube that's very clear. And he puts all the things out there. So if any. Anyone wants to go listen to it, that's what I'd recommend.

34:24 Mark: It's interesting how historically interactionism has. It's very natural to think that you might need a God involved. If you want to say things only happen when there's an observer like for Berkeley, then well, maybe you have to have an observer there all the time. So that was Berkeley's solution. Is that the reason that there is objectivity in the physical world is because even though everything is mental, because he's an idealist. It's because even though you might have come up with this idea thinking about human minds and the fact that Berkeley thought it didn't make any sense to have a triangle that nobody is thinking of or whatever.

Like there was something inconceivable about that kind of idea. But the way he gets objectivity back is by just expanding this into, well, there must be a God watching things all the time. West brought up Leibniz as an example of type F monism, and that's an interesting way to think about Leibniz as a monist. I think explicitly he was a dualist. It's just not an interactionist dualist. It was that there's the chain of mental causation and there's the chain of physical causation, and those run ever in parallel because the harmony pre established in those two entirely distinct levels of causation by God.

35:34 Wes: He's an epiphenomenalist in that sense.

35:36 Mark: Yeah, Even epiphenomenalist has causes up. Right. The materialist causes. So he's neither.

35:43 Wes: Except insofar as you see God as sort of the monist material providing the causal.

35:48 Dylan: Yeah, the monad.

35:49 Mark: Right. Which you could interpret Spinoza the same way, even though Spinoza is kind of famous as being a monist, that there's one type of thing and it has a physical aspect and a material aspect. But if you say that the one type of thing that is everywhere is God, which of course there are different reasons why you might or might not want to say that, and why Spinoza was called a. An atheist and things like that. But it's very tricky once you introduce a God or something that could be described as God as part of the equation, as to whether you're talking about a dualism or a monism with two separate aspects in this way, I certainly like the idea, the monist idea of what consciousness is is a point of view.

So there's a point of view whether there's actually a mind there to take advantage of that point of view, or that there's just an atom there, or whether there's just void there, but there's still also, always from any given point in space, point in time, that there is a view out. I don't know. There's something that I'd like to think more about in terms of that. And then if you think like what makes us attribute consciousness something is that it gains more of the capacity to sort of take advantage of this point of view. But if we were two different beings occupying the same space or whatever, then we would have the same point of view.

You know, it's a fundamental metaphysical aspect of the universe.

37:06 Gregory: I think that is an interesting way to think about it. And I think that is a kind of root, the type F monist picture that everything is kind of at bottom has this internal. This is Leibniz thing. It has this kind of internal activity, this point of viewedness. Our minds are really just the combination of these smaller internal sort of points of views, as you put it, Mark.

37:28 Mark: It is hard to make that. You know, I was saying as you get more developed creatures, they can take advantage of that. But there is something weird about that, right? The only reason that we have the rich phenomenal quality of seeing red is because we have these photoreceptors for seeing red and we have a causal connection to light that has certain wavelength in the world. So specific qualia are certainly specific to types of organisms that can have that kind of qualia. But if we want to say that there's a difference between specific qualia and just qualia ness quality itself, that's a bad way of putting it, just having a point of view.

But this is something. This is at the end of the Papineau paper that he's saying, look, I've been talking at this point about just what is it like for me to be in pain versus what it's like for, you know, Commander Data or whatever to be in pain, different creatures. And you might say, well, I'm not concerned with specific qualia. I'm not concerned with the, specifically the feel of being in pain or the feel of being red. I'm just concerned with feeling at all. And the question is, does it make sense? I think a panpsychist view where consciousness is fundamentally a point of view, but that is lacking any specific qualitative distinctions, like you might wonder if that makes sense.

Like, can you have a qualia without a qualitative content? Because that does seem to be what the raw panpsychist's point of view would be.

38:53 Gregory: Yeah, so philosophers use this term which is determinate versus determinable, right? I think that's what Papineau uses in the paper we read. So you might think like scarlet is a determinate of the determinable red. Now you might think my experience of scarlet is a determinate of my determinable experience, red. And likewise, you might think that my experience of red is a determinant of the determinable experience. Now, the type F monist or the panpsychist, they don't say that the little bits down there, right? The little fundamental simples that make up the world, they don't say that.

They just have this generic determinable state which is consciousness. Most think that they have determinate types of experience. So there's a really interesting paper by a gentleman called Patrick Lewtas. And again, you might want to go read this, and listeners might want to read this. And it's called what it's like to be a quark. Right? I think it's 2013, and it kind of takes Thomas Nagel's what it's like to be a bat paper and just goes, what it's like to be a quark. And there he lays out principles. So as Chalmers mentions in the paper, in type F monism, the type F monist usually thinks that these certain types of fundamental physical properties must have underlying intrinsic phenomenal nature.

Now, the panpsychist or the type F monist says that the connection between those has to be intimate. Right? Now they say something like this. For every fundamental physical property, there is the corresponding fundamental phenomenal property. So fundamental atoms, whatever they are, let's say, don't feel just generally conscious. If it has mass, then it feels like whatever mass feels like, they say. And if it has spin, then it feels like whatever spin feels like. And if it has charge, then it feels like whatever charge feels like. So each fundamental physical property has a corresponding fundamental phenomenal property.

So they don't just go, it's just general consciousness. They say, oh no, there's kind of specific states that are hard to form a concept of. But that's what they feel like. I think that's the general idea.

41:14 Dylan: Do they make a distinction in this kind of thing between the relative fundamentalness or intrinsicness of characteristics of charge and spin versus mass? Because mass has this kind of funny characteristic, right, of being related to energy and then also being a consequence in the general theory of the spatiotemporal structure of the universe. And sort of in that way, mass is epiphenomenal. It's not in some funny way accounted for by other things. The way in which an atom is accounted for by the characteristics of analogical to the way an atom is accounted for by there being electrons, protons and neutrons that have their own charge and spin characteristics.

And so therefore atoms aren't fundamental. They don't have something intrinsic. If they have something intrinsic over and above the nature of neutrons, protons and electrons, then that's a kind of emergent characteristic of electrons, protons and neutrons that is manifest in atoms. So that's a kind of emergent characteristic. But I guess the short version of my question is, do they note the difference between mass being fundamental or not?

42:30 Gregory: So do they note the difference between mass being fundamental compared to other properties

42:34 Dylan: being fundamental compared to spin and charge?

42:37 Gregory: Well, I guess really they would just say, look, only the fundamental ones have this inner nature, right? So if property P, insert favorite property there, isn't fundamental, then it's not guaranteed that it'll have one. Right?

42:51 Dylan: Yeah. So that. Yeah, the answer is just. You have to have an example about it.

42:55 Gregory: Yeah, yeah. But then the interesting question arises, like, okay, well, if that one's not fundamental, then why isn't there something for that one? Whereas if this one is fundamental, why is there something for this one?

43:07 Mark: Well, that's a lot of fun. I mean, I think it's clear from looking at the Chalmers sections on this type F monism and the various types of dualism that they're weird and problematic. But he insists that they're not weird and problematic in, like, definitive ways as opposed to. He thinks that the different types of materialism actually are problematic in definitive ways. And I don't think we've given those, you know, how do we actually evaluate the, say, the conceivability argument that Dylan was raising? Can I conceive of zombies? How could I even tell whether conceiving of zombies is something, you know, whether the Type A materialist could be right, that you can simply deny that zombies are conceivable or whether you should accept that they're conceivable as the Type B materialist does, but deny that they are metaphysically possible.

In other words, we can look at the connection between conceivability and metaphysical possibility. We had a past episode on Saul Kripke and another one right after that on Hilary Putnam, where we got into that quite a bit. So maybe we can address those next time when we take up the block paper specifically and get into this Papineau. So this was, as I kind of thought when I was coming up with the reading list, just too ambitious for us to cover all three of these in one discussion. So we're going to push the remaining material off to the next one.

So come back for that. Some final announcements. As you may or may not know, I have started yet another podcast. It is a culture podcast on movies, TV, music, comics, comedy, theater, etc. I'm doing it with my old friend Brian Hirt of the Constellary Tales podcast and Erica Spyres, who you recently heard on our Calderon episode. It's called Pretty Much a Culture Podcast. It is not yet formally launched, but you can hear the first discussion for free@patreon.com pretty much pop. And there's also some bonus content up there already if you want to support it.

Finally, our closing song in honor of the hard problem. The song is called Georgia Hard. It's by Robbie Fulks, a sharp as nails country genius. I had the privilege to interview him for Nakedly examined music Episode 36. So check that out. Nakedlyexaminemusic.com Good night everybody.

45:21 Dylan: Good night.

45:22 Gregory: Good night.

45:29 Unknown speaker: She said she was leaving so I went to follow blind love and die? 55 got me here? Dirty old salt truck in the smog before me? And dear old Dixie Back in the rear view mirror? Got a third story walk up with a view of the alley? A mailroom job that isn't all glamour and fun? The woman I came for is gone to another? And now my feet are just too planted to run? There's no Carolina, no mer Chicago? No bluegrass growing out in my backyard? No fields or sugar cane? No sausage in Maine? But now this living ain't Georgia high? Down on Hallstead the women won't buy me?

Like they can tell I haven't got a dollar to spare? So it's a new side screen or a beer in a cell? That song. I guess some things are the same most everywhere? There's no Caroline moon over Chicago? No blue grass growing out in my backyard? No peels or sugar cane no are Virginia? But damn this living ain't Georgia heart? Yeah? So please Mr. Conwell could you accept the charges? When I told you a cold day and thinking I lied? And if you're pecan trees are sterile Needs shaking well I'll be back a bacon fast as the great dog flies? Cause there's no Carolina moon over Chicago?

No bluegrass growing out in my backyard? No fields of sugar cane, no suffraget made? But damn if this living ain't your heart? No fields are sugar t no stops of genuine? But damn this lemon ain't Georgia heart? It.