Thursday, April 10, 2008

Panprotoexperientialism, Anyone?   [John Derbyshire]

The rest of Wednesday was a mixed bag. We had an address from Andy Clark of the University of Edinburgh, who I'd been told was a superstar in the field. Well, he was good, but not that good. His big thing — his shtick, if you like — is the "extended mind." This is the notion that, as he himself put it, "skin and skull are porous." A person's mind can (he says) fairly be taken to include things other than the brain. Cute anecdote: "A person asks me, 'Do you know the time?'  'Yes,' I reply … and then I look at my watch …  So my 'I' includes my watch." A good speaker with interesting things to say; but going over the material afterwards I found my self thinking "Hey, wait a minute" rather a lot.

One thing you wonder in advance about conferences like this is what the proportions will be of (a) real research results and original insights, as opposed to (b) academic log-rolling, tenured self-indulgence, flogging of dead horses, and content-free arm-waving. In the afternoon plenary session we got some of the (b).

The topic was "Sex and consciousness." Barry Komisaruk of Rutgers started with an interesting account of some neurophysiological experiments, then wandered off into the arm-waving zone. Sample: "If time is a fourth dimension, why can't consciousness be a fifth dimension?" Uh, because you can quantify time, but you can't quantify consciousness. How are you gonna set up a co-ordinate axis if you can't quantify?

Then Jenny Wade (not sure of her affiliation) got up and told us about some research she'd done. She'd got a sample heavily loaded with middle-aged university women and asked them about their mind states during sex. For heaven's sake: I can get this stuff from reading Erica Jong. I left when she started talking about Tantric sex. I know Tibet's in the news, but really.

On to panpsychism in the evening sessions. I was mildly expecting to get converted to panpsychism. Galen Strawson has come up with some arguments that seem plausible to me. If he can sign on to panpsychism, I'm pretty much ready to as well.

Unfortunately the speakers weren't that convincing. I want to reread my notes and some of the abstracts, but I thought there was a fair amount of arm-waving here, too. Bill Seager (University of Toronto) had some fun with words and syllogisms, but I had trouble seeing anything behind it all. Leopold Stubenberg wants to resurrect Russell's "neutral monism" of 80 years ago. Can't we make some progress here? ("Monism" — reality is made of only one kind of stuff. "Neutral" — the stuff is neither mental nor material.) Steve Deiss (UCSD) seemed to me to be taking things too far, defining matter down: "Things are interpretations of qualia." Na-uh, they're things. Doctor Johnson's famous refutation of Bishop Berkeley came to mind.

David Skrbina (U. Mich.) gave a lucid exposition of a Dynamical Systems Theory approach to thinking. Nice to see good old statistical mechanics make a showing, but David left me feeling he'd just put together a model of brain function without telling me anything about consciousness. (Though in fairness, his presentation was pretty dense, and I really need to reread my notes here.) Then Jonathan Powell from the University of Reading took us back to quantum weirdness, but getting to nitty-gritty with it at the level of neuronal microtubules, which I haven't seen done before. This looks really promising.

As part of the session, we were asked to vote on a new name for panpsychism. We were offered nine choices.

1. Stick with panpsychism: "Panpsychism is either the view that all parts of matter involve mind, or the more holistic view that the whole universe is an organism that possesses a mind …"
2. Hylozoism is the philosophical conjecture that all or some material things possess life, or that all life is inseparable from matter.
3. Animism is the belief in souls, which may, depending on your religious preference, be present in animals, plants, and objects, as well as in people.
4. Panexperientialism credits all entities with phenomenal consciousness but not necessarily with cognition.
5. Panprotoexperientialism is a weaker form of panexperientialism, crediting entities only with latent consciousness.
6. Quantum Animism attributes spirit, mind, or mentality only to quantum-realm particles.
7. Vitalism invokes a non-physical "élan vital" or "life spark."
8. Neo-Psychism: a new term we might coin to detach ourselves from traditional panpsychism and its connotations.
9. Neo-Animism (on the same principle).

I think "hylozoism" is the prettiest of these possibilities (and surprisingly old — it was coined in 1678 by Ralph Cudworth), but I voted to keep "panpsychism."

04/10 09:20 AMShare