In response to my recent reflections on panpsychism—the belief that consciousness is a fundamental property of every particle in the universe—the philosopher Nino Kadic (Kadić), who has defended the view, has offered a response. I’ll try to succinctly answer his comments here and explain my views further.
“Panpsychists don’t claim that science has failed, but rather that it’s incomplete.”
That seems like semantics. Panpsychists do think that science has failed to give a full explanation of consciousness.
“Science perfectly captures the structural aspects of reality. If consciousness cannot be explained in such terms, if it’s something categorical and non-dispositional, the argument is that it is the best candidate to play that role generally.“
Disagreement here needs the most spelling out in terms of metaphysics and the philosophy of science. But to put it briefly, I think panpsychists offer a very restrictive description of what science does that few contemporary philosophers of science would not agree with. I would welcome serious engagement by panpsychists with the contemporary literature. One of my Ph.D. supervisors, Peter Godfrey-Smith, offered a similar response here in a interview with Alex O’Connor (timestamp 42:46) that is worth listening to.
“The move from panpsychism to fine-tuning or some sort of anti-Darwinian view is by no means entailed by panpsychism, it’s a separate set of beliefs held by some panpsychists you mentioned, so using it to discredit the theory as a whole is unfair.”
I didn’t argue that one implies the other. But there are striking parallels in the reasoning and given the small number of panpsychists, it is curious that they seem to come frequently together.
“Calling it pseudophilosophy is wild, considering how influential panpsychism has been in Western philosophy, and the arguments panpsychists use are technical and rigorous.”
But that’s the whole point of the chmess analogy. Working out the truths of different varieties of chess can be highly technical and rigorous. The same goes for trying to improve ANY theory in philosophy. But they may nonetheless fail to progress our understanding of the world. A lot of theories in science have been highly influential in Western thought. Most of them are now pseudoscience. Perhaps panpsychism will meet the same fate one day. Unfortunately, the norms of our discipline are set up to emulate the Pyrrhonian skeptics, who thought (to simplify a lot) that we should bring alternative views into argumentative balance. The easiest way to make a name for oneself in philosophy is to invent an entirely new view or at least be one of the lonely defenders of an odd view, not because it is true or superior to its alternatives, but because these non-mainstream views are also severely underdeveloped. It is easy to improve them further. That is a striking difference between how philosophy and science operate.
Add to that the welcome embrace of more pluralism in the discipline, compared to earlier times in which philosophers could be quite hostile to views they disagreed with, and the result is the unfortunate impression to the outside world that philosophy (and the philosophy of mind) is just in the business of coming up with new theories, but never making progress—not trying to figure out which is right.
I contend that much of the reason panpsychism is gaining (primarily public) attention is its oddity, much as the public would be fascinated if we were to let scientists defend all kinds of outlandish theories just to let a thousand flowers bloom. (We can see this frequently with contrarian scientists invited onto prominent podcasts.) Not all scientific theories are equal. And the same should be true in philosophy. The physicalist empirical study of consciousness has made such significant strides in our understanding of the mind that the calls of panpsychists to revolutionize physics strike me like those of creationists who do not believe in evolution despite all of the progress in evolutionary biology.
Much further work on the development on panpsychism may change the common perception of it. But until then, it’s not entirely unreasonable to treat it like a scientist aiming to bring back a geocentric view of the world that placed the Earth at the centre of everything. Perhaps panpsychism is like the development of the geocentric model—a model that became increasingly complex and sophisticated, involving brilliant minds and arguments, but was simply wrong.
“The whole motivation behind panpsychism rests on the commitment that there is ‘something it is like’ to be me and that this cannot be fully analysed in third-person, structural terms. Panpsychism just adds a category to help explain this, after reductionism and emergentism failed. Physicalism, as you indirectly imply, remains a promissory note. In 500, not 50, years, the same hard problem of accounting for first-person, subjective facts and the properties they entail, via third-person, objective language, will remain.”
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What does a full analysis entail? Can we have a full analysis of Jupiter? Can we have a full analysis of the descent of humans from other Great ape lineages? What about the origin of life? No. Not even in 5000 years. But that doesn’t imply unsolveable mysteries that would require an alternative to science itself. Gaps in our knowledge are forever. Mysteries are not. Talking of scientists failing to explain consciousness fully strikes me as a rhetorical trick, because it’s a truism for explanations of any other phenomenon. It’s reminiscent of the repeated creationist demand for “the missing link,” which was also a rhetorical trick.