We have made a great deal of progress in understanding brain activity, and how it contributes to human behavior. But what no one has so far managed to explain is how all of this results in feelings, emotions and experiences. How does the passing around of electrical and chemical signals between neurons result in a feeling of pain or an experience of red? There is growing suspicion that conventional scientific methods will never be able to answer these questions. Luckily, there is an alternative approach that may ultimately be able to crack the mystery.
For much of the 20th century, there was a great taboo against querying the mysterious inner world of consciousness — it was not taken to be a fitting topic for "serious science.
But many consciousness researchers underestimate the depth of the challenge, believing that we just need to continue examining the physical structures of the brain to work out how they produce consciousness. The problem of consciousness, however, is radically unlike any other scientific problem. One reason is that consciousness is unobservable. You can't look inside someone's head and see their feelings and experiences.
If we were just going off what we can observe from a third-person perspective, we would have no grounds for postulating consciousness at all. Of course, scientists are used to dealing with unobservables. Electrons, for example, are too small to be seen. But scientists postulate unobservable entities in order to explain what we observe, such as lightning or vapor trails in cloud chambers.
Physics tells us absolutely nothing about what philosophers like to call the intrinsic nature of matter: what matter is, in and of itself. So it turns out that there is a huge hole in our scientific story. The proposal of the panpsychist is to put consciousness in that hole. Consciousness, for the panpsychist, is the intrinsic nature of matter. But matter can be described from two perspectives.
What this offers us is a beautifully simple, elegant way of integrating consciousness into our scientific worldview, of marrying what we know about ourselves from the inside and what science tells us about matter from the outside. What are the objections to this idea that you hear most frequently? And how do you respond? At the end of the day, you should judge a view not by its cultural associations but by its explanatory power. Panpsychism gives us a way of resolving the mystery of consciousness, a way that avoids the deep difficulties that plague more conventional options.
There is a profound difficulty at the heart of the science of consciousness: consciousness is unobservable. We know that consciousness exists not from observation and experiment but by being conscious. In this way, scientists are able correlate certain kinds of brain activity with certain kinds of experience.
We now know which kinds of brain activity are associated with feelings of hunger, with visual experiences, with pleasure, pain, anxiety, et cetera. Why is it that, say, a certain kind of activity in the hypothalamus is associated with the feeling of hunger? Why should that be so? As soon as you start to answer this question, you move beyond what can be, strictly speaking, tested, simply because consciousness is unobservable. Taschereau-Dumouchel, V. Natl Acad. USA , — Michel, M. Nature Hum.
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IIT backs panpsychism to a great extent because even a proton can possess phi, according to the theory. And just as an apple, thermostat and computer can possess it, so can your chair and your desk all manner of other things across the universe. Only the whole has conscious experience, not the parts. Applied to your brain, it means that some of your cortex might be conscious but the particles that make up the cortex are not themselves conscious.
So according to IIT, the universe is indeed full of consciousness. But does it have implications for the physical part of the universe? The math of the theory says it does not. A physical system will operate independently, whether it has a conscious experience or not.
Kleiner gives a computer as an example, saying that IIT's math shows it may have consciousness but that won't change the way in which it operates.
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