Now what are the alternatives, right? I mean, I think we can take it as a fact that materialism doesn't work. It's internally contradictory, empirically inadequate, doesn't have explanatory power, and leads to insoluble problems. And we've been talking a lot about analytic idealism as the option. Are there other options?
I can mention three. I'll speak briefly about two of them and more extensively about the third. The first one is dualism, which is how the religions of the book have interpreted the world for a couple of thousand years now. Which is the idea that there is the material body and there is the soul, which is a different kind of stuff. And the two interact somehow.
That leads to more problems than it solves. One of the most acknowledged problems is the interaction problem. How can two fundamentally different kinds of stuff interact with one another, because interaction presupposes that one enters the domain of the other. But if they are fundamentally distinct, how can they enter each other's domain?
If they do, then they are not fundamentally distinct, and we get back to the original problem. I will leave dualism at that. It's not a much discussed alternative in philosophy today, in my view, for very good reasons.
Another one is solipsism, which is the most skeptical. view of things that you can have and it basically says the following only you only your personal self exist i exist only in so far as you are watching this video there is nothing it is like to be me i don't have my own conscious perspective in the world different from yours i exist only as an appearance to you i exist only in so far as what you perceive of me and nothing else. Nobody else exists.
The entire world, the whole of the universe, is your personal dream and nothing beyond that. There is nothing beyond what you experience. There is no existence, no universe, no other people beyond what you experience of them. That's solipsism. Bertrand Russell once said that Solipsism is contradicted even by the people who mean to believe it.
In other words, it's impossible to believe. Because whoever believes in solipsism will not be engaged in a debate about it. Because his belief is that the people he will be debating are the figments of his own imagination.
So there is no one to debate with. I agree with Russell. Nobody believes truly in solipsism. Even the people who claim they do, they act as if they didn't. Imagine a conference of solipsists.
How internally contradictory that would be. I also think, although it's the most skeptical worldview, it is not the most reasonable. Early on in life, we have some experiences that only make sense to us later in life. So we couldn't have self-generated those experiences before we knew why they arise and what they mean.
For instance, when I was a kid, a young kid, I had a much older cousin, a girl, who was madly in love with her boyfriend. And she acted in very strange ways from my kid's perspective. She became silly after she fell in love. I couldn't understand her behavior.
So how could I have generated that behavior out of my imagination before I understood the underlying mechanisms of that behavior? You could have said, well, we just projected it. Well, but if I projected it, I projected something that I only understood later, when I fell in love with myself, and then I realized, oh, now I understand why she was behaving that way.
How could I have generated her behavior out of my own imagination before I understood it? No, the most reasonable explanation for the facts is that my cousin, too, had a conscious inner life of her own. And she had experienced this thing called love before I came across it, before I knew what it was. So I think we can discard solipsism on the basis that nobody truly believes it and that it's not the most reasonable account of the facts.
And now the third and last alternative, which is commonly called panpsychism. Now, let me first say that there are many different... theories that go under the name panpsychism, some of them indistinguishable from idealism. certain versions of panpsychism that are also called cosmopsychism. Certain cosmopsychisms are virtually indistinguishable from idealism.
But what most people understand panpsychism to mean is what philosophers technically call constitutive micropsychism. And the idea is the following. Matter truly exists. There are little elementary subatomic particles out there. in addition to their quantitative properties, such as mass, charge, momentum, spin, and so forth, they also have qualitative properties.
In other words, there is something it is like to be an electron. An electron has a pixel of consciousness, has a seed of consciousness. To be an electron means that you experience something.
Even if incredibly simple, it does have a qualitative dimension to its existence. That is what most people understand by panpsychism. Matter exists, but it is fundamentally conscious.
Therefore, you don't need to explain how consciousness is created out of matter. Matter is already conscious from the get-go, fundamentally. Now, mass is an intrinsic property of matter, so is charge, so is momentum, and so is experience.
Under panpsychism, electrons are conscious. You could summarize it that way. And our conscious inner life somehow arises from the combination, the coming together of the tiny little subjectivities of the gazillions of subatomic particles that constitute our nervous system. That's the theory.
Now, there are a number of reasons why this is untenable, a couple of them categorical and definitive. Let's start from the more arguable ones. There is a problem to panpsychism that in the literature is called the subject-combination problem. And that has to do with the fact that nobody seems able to articulate explicitly and coherently How is it that different subatomic particles with separate subjectivities can come together and their subjectivities can combine to form a higher level subjectivity?
This combination of subjectivities is not explicitly articulated and there are arguments in the literature that not only is it not articulated, it can never be articulated because it is a fundamentally incoherent. idea. It will never work theoretically. I happen to agree with those comments.
I happen to agree that the combination problem is insoluble and panpsychism is therefore untenable. But there are yet better reasons. Before I get to the best of all, another thing to take into account is the following.
One of the motivations for panpsychism It's this notion that we, our own nervous system, is a compound entity. It's an entity formed out of parts. So our brain is constituted of neurons.
And we like to regard the individual neurons as the parts of the brain. The brain is the coming together of these parts, the coming together of these neurons. And if our consciousness is correlated with the brain, then our consciousness itself should be the coming together of parts, of smaller subjectivities. There is a fundamental error in this line of thinking, and it happens in the very beginning, which is the notion that we are made of parts.
A car is made of parts. Why? Because the structure and function of the car are defined from the outside in.
Engineers design the car, the parts are brought together and welded together in the manufacturing line. The structure and function are defined from the outside in. People are not assembled like cars. People grow.
Growth is completely different from assemblage. In growth, the structure and function are defined from the inside out. Raw materials still go in, but the structure and function...
Their roles and positions in the organism are defined from the inside out. Therefore, an entity that has grown cannot be said to be made of parts, at least not in the same sense that a car can be said to be made of parts. Because unlike the car, which has parts that were brought together from the outside in, the person or the entity that has grown has no parts that have been brought together from the outside in. They have grown from the inside out. There is a very important sense in which neurons are not parts of the organism.
Neurons are the reflection of the self-similar inner complexification of the organism. An organism creates inner structure, not the coming together of parts. If you look at a human zygote, you know, a fertilized human egg, immediately after fertilization, it's a little ball, has a certain diameter.
and is housed on the side of the uterus. Three days later that little ball, which is one cell, would have eight cells inside, but it will have the same diameter. And if you look at a photo comparison of the two, it is obvious to the eye that the three-day-old embryo is still the original zygote, it's still the original egg fertilized, just one that has created inner complexification, inner structure. The eight cells are not parts of the embryo. They are the inner structure of the embryo created through self-similarity.
In other words, cell division, mitosis. You could even say that that's a fractal inner structure because it's self-similar. Each part looks like the original zygote. Each part looks like a cell.
And they are not parts. They are just the... inner structure of the original zygote.
You could say that a fully grown human being is still the original zygote. It's still the egg immediately after fertilization. It's the same entity, just with more inner structure, more inner differentiation, more inner complexification. A human being is not made of parts for exactly the same reason that the zygote is not made of parts, if you consider themselves to be the parts. is a single cell.
A human being is still the zygote and the multiple cells are just the inner differentiation of the original entity. We are the exact same original entity. We were not assembled by bringing parts together.
We are the original entity throughout which just has created more inner differentiation. So neurons are not parts of the brain. Neurons are what the inner structure of this whole entity we call a human being looks like.
They are the discernible groups of pixels of the image that the body is. The only part of the human being is the whole thing. And what we consider to be parts are merely nominally so. They are arbitrary parts.
They are groupings of pixels of the image that for convenience we group together and we give them names. Neurons. Neurons are not parts.
To think of neurons as parts is to think of a human being as a car manufactured in an assembly line. That's a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference, the obvious, glaring difference between assemblage and growth. So that motivation for panpsychism is invalid.
But now let's go to the definitive argument, the argument that just ends the story. Panpsychists assume... That the fundamental building blocks of nature, in other words elementary subatomic particles, they have discrete spatial boundaries.
They are little things. They are marbles, like glass little marbles, just very very very tiny, but they have their own well-defined spatial boundaries. And that's why, according to the panpsychist, the combinations of the marbles in my head produce my consciousness, And the combinations of marbles in your head produce your consciousness separate from mine. Because my marbles are spatially bound inside my head and your marbles are spatially bound inside your head. And that's why I can't read your thoughts.
Or presumably you can't read my thoughts. That's why we have different minds. Because the marbles are different and they are located in different points of space and they have defined spatial boundaries.
Is that what subatomic particles are? No, and we have known that arguably since the late 20s, but at least since the late 40s. What physicists today call subatomic particles.
We call them particles only for two reasons. One, historical reasons. Before the 1920s, the late 1920s, we did think of elementary subatomic particles as little marbles.
And the other reason is metaphorical. It's a convenient metaphor to talk about particles. But particles are not things in exactly the same way that a ripple is not a thing distinct from the lake where it ripples. Imagine a lake and there is a ripple going across the lake, you can point at the ripple and say there is the ripple. It has a precise spatial location.
It has physical characteristics. It has a height, has a breath, has a speed and direction of movement. Yet you cannot reach into the lake and grab the ripple and pull it out of the lake because the ripple is not a thing.
The ripple is a doing of the lake. The ripple is an action, is a behavior of the lake. There is nothing to the ripple but the lake.
We just nominally give a name to a pattern of behavior of the lake to make communication easier. But ripples are not things, even though they are identifiable and have physical characteristics. There is nothing to the ripple but the lake.
Now, in precisely the same way, quantum field theory, which is the most successful theory in the history of science, tells us that subatomic particles are ripples in a quantum field. There is nothing to the subatomic particle but the field, just as there is nothing to the ripple but the lake. The subatomic particle is a doing of the field, is a behavior of the field, and it has physical characteristics and even has a spatial location just like the ripple has. But subatomic particles are not things.
Therefore the spatial location of the subatomic particle is not the spatial boundary of the only thing that exists. Only the field exists and under quantum theory, quantum field theory, the field has no spatial boundaries. All quantum fields span the entire universe. They are not localized here and there.
But ripples in it are. But again, ripples are not things. There is nothing to the ripple but the field.
So if the panpsychist wants to attribute consciousness as a fundamental property of an element of nature, a thing, then it has to be the field, because there are no particles. And if it is the field, then the same fields, the same quantum fields, span my mind and your mind, my brain and your brain, and everybody else's brains. Therefore, panpsychism cannot account for the fact that I can't read your thoughts and you can't read mine.
Panpsychists have a very outdated, a hundred year outdated understanding of what subatomic particles are, of what physicists mean when they talk of subatomic particles today. Now some panpsychists will appeal to niche interpretations of quantum physics to try to preserve the marble notion of a subatomic particle, especially to Bohmian mechanics, which is an interpretation developed in the early 50s and renounced by its own creator. a French physicist, De Broglie, because it preserves the marble-like nature of particles. But, well, a few years ago, we have experimentally refuted Bohmian mechanics. That's one part of it.
And the other part of it is, even if we haven't experimentally refuted it, we cannot reconcile it with special relativity. And that makes it untenable, because we know special relativity holds. You see, there are a great many things, a great many...
empirical events in nature that can only be accounted for if we understand particles to be ripples, excitations of an underlying field. Otherwise, we cannot account for them. Let me name a couple of examples. We know that in a perfect vacuum, particles come in and out of existence.
We call them virtual particles or quantum fluctuations. So even in a perfect vacuum, particles come in and out of existence randomly. If particles were marbles, this would amount to magic. This would amount to a miracle.
But if particles are fields, those fields get excited, like the surface of a lake, and ripples come and disappear. There is nothing magical about it because there are no particles, there is only the field. What we call particles are just ripples of the field.
So quantum fluctuations are not magical. And we need quantum fluctuations to explain, well, Everything, the entire cosmos. Because after the Big Bang it was quantum fluctuations that created a break in the uniform distribution of energy around the cosmos, which because of gravity came to form stars, planets, moons, galaxies, galaxy clusters, you and I, everything.
Without quantum fluctuations there would be nothing and pentpsychism assumes something that defies quantum fluctuations. Quantum fluctuations would not be possible under a pentpsychist view of particles. Or another example I don't want to belabor this too much, but we know that some particles decay into other particles. And these other particles don't exist in the original particle. They were not parts of the original particles.
So how come particle A decay into particles B and C if B and C were not part of particle A? It's magical, right? Yet we know it happens.
Well, it's not magical if you understand particle A to be a ripple. And a ripple may decay in other different ripples that were not part of the original ripple. There's nothing magical about it unless you think of particles as marbles, which they are not.
And we've known for about 100 years that they are not. Pentaicism is completely untenable because it is inconsistent with physics itself.