Brain, Mind, & Self
In which I (actually Spinoza [actually the Torah]) solve the “hard problem of consciousness.”
“A horse walks into a bar. The bartender asks if it wants a drink. The horse says, “I think not” and instantly vanishes. Those of you who know philosophy will get this joke, since you’re familiar with the proposition, ‘cogito, ergo sum,’ or, ‘I think, therefore, I am.’ But to explain that concept at the beginning would be putting Descartes before the horse.”
— An anonymous jokester
I. You are someone. (Well, I am, anyway.)
When I was an insufferable freshman in college, and very much more left-leaning and closed-minded than I am now, I wrote a little ditty that began:
René Descartes, you’re really a sham!
I know you’re always saying how you Think, therefore you Am,
But René Descartes, don’t Republicans exist?
They can’t think, but they must be there, or they couldn’t make us pissed!
I am ashamed to say that there was more after that. (There is even a recording, but in the interests of my dignity, no, I will not be sharing it…)
I bring this up merely to say: Descartes was not, in fact, a sham. The man had an excellent point, and it is this: The surest thing we know is that we are someone.
But I shouldn’t say “we.” I, Seth Chalmer, know that I, personally, am someone. I can’t speak for you. Sorry. Technically, it’s possible that all the rest of you out there are “philosophical zombies” — people who are normal humans in every possible external way (speech, actions, demonstrated intelligence, etc.) but there is no internal experience of being them. Of being you, I should say — for all I know. However, as a convenience to ourselves as much as a kindness to others, most of us generally go around assuming that everyone else has an internal experience just as we do ourselves, and I will gladly agree to extend you this courtesy if you will do the same for me.
Anyway, “At least I know I’m someone” is the heart of what Descartes meant by cogito, ergo sum. His “cogito” wasn’t about mentally doing math problems, or crafting a political platform that 18-year-old Seth would agree with, or visualizing a wanton strumpet preparing a cheese platter; he simply meant that the mental sense we have of being a self who perceives our lives happening is the most basic thing we know. Everything else depends on that. And, since we could theoretically be wrong about literally everything else — we could be living inside a dream, say, or unknowingly living in an insane asylum and hallucinating the life we think we have, that sense of being a self is the only thing we can be truly sure about.
II. Are you really anyone?
Descartes takes this certainty of selfhood (via some detours) as proof of a soul that is distinct from the body. And that’s called dualism — the idea that the mind and body are, in some way, separate, whether in the form of the traditional religious concept of body and soul or in some other way.
But many people reject the argument that consciousness is proof of a soul, and for sound reasons. Consciousness seems bound up with the physicality of the brain. If you were to damage parts of my brain (please don’t), that would have predictable effects on my consciousness. If my consciousness were my soul and not my body, why should hurting my brain change it? Furthermore, neural imaging can show us which parts of a brain are dancing their little neuronal fandangos in correspondence with which kinds of mental phenomena. Correlation doesn’t prove causation, but when you’ve only got one correlate to work with, and that correlate is very clear, it becomes the most plausible candidate for a cause.
That’s why the dominant position among educated people now is physicalism — the position that consciousness, like everything else, is a purely physical phenomenon with no properties that physical science cannot explain.
But that position, too, has problems. In 1995, philosopher David Chalmers (no relation; while we both Chalm, he munificently Chalmers in the plural, while I, alas, have pretensions only to be a singular Chalmer) coined the term “the hard problem of consciousness” in his famous paper, “Facing up to the problem of consciousness”:
“Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain… ‘Consciousness’ is an ambiguous term, referring to many different phenomena. Each of these phenomena needs to be explained, but some are easier to explain than others. At the start, it is useful to divide the associated problems of consciousness into ‘hard’ and ‘easy’ problems. The easy problems of consciousness are those that seem directly susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science, whereby a phenomenon is explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms. The hard problems are those that seem to resist those methods…”
(Note: Throughout this post, bold emphasis in quotations is my own, while emphasis in italics is from the original being quoted.)
Chalmers’s examples of “easy problems” include reacting to stimuli, integrating information, reporting mental states, focusing attention, controlling behavior, and the difference between wakefulness and sleep. All these, Chalmers agrees, are easy to explain using physical science.
“The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience… It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does. If any problem qualifies as the problem of consciousness, it is this one…
Why doesn’t all this information-processing go on “in the dark”, free of any inner feel?… We know that conscious experience does arise when these functions are performed, but the very fact that it arises is the central mystery.”
Chalmers ultimately decides physics can’t explain experience at all, and that we need to think of subjective experience as something fundamental and outside of physics. He explicitly avers that this makes him a dualist.
“I suggest that a theory of consciousness should take experience as fundamental… we will take experience itself as a fundamental feature of the world, alongside mass, charge, and space-time… If we take experience as fundamental, then we can go about the business of constructing a theory of experience… [A] nonreductive theory of experience will specify basic principles telling us how experience depends on physical features of the world. These psychophysical principles will not interfere with physical laws, as it seems that physical laws already form a closed system. Rather, they will be a supplement to a physical theory. A physical theory gives a theory of physical processes, and a psychophysical theory tells us how those processes give rise to experience…
This position qualifies as a variety of dualism, as it postulates basic properties over and above the properties invoked by physics. But it is an innocent version of dualism, entirely compatible with the scientific view of the world.”
Physicalists don’t just disagree with Chalmers’s solution to the “hard problem” of consciousness — they deny that there is such a problem. They assert that the mental phenomena that fit into the “easy problem” category are simply all there is. Here’s Daniel Dennett commenting on Chalmers in 1996:
“What impresses me about my own consciousness, as I know it so intimately, is my delight in some features and dismay over others, my distraction and concentration, my unnamable sinking feelings of foreboding and my blithe disregard of some perceptual details, my obsessions and oversights, my ability to conjure up fantasies, my inability to hold more than a few items in consciousness at a time, my ability to be moved to tears by a vivid recollection of the death of a loved one, my inability to catch myself in the act of framing the words I sometimes say to myself, and so forth. These are all ‘merely’ the ‘performance of functions’… In the course of making an introspective catalogue of evidence, I wouldn't know what I was thinking about if I couldn't identify them for myself by these functional differentia. Subtract them away, and nothing is left beyond a weird conviction (in some people) that there is some ineffable residue of ‘qualitative content’ bereft of all powers to move us, delight us, annoy us, remind us of anything.”
Dennett believes that if you subtracted all the information-processing mental functions from your mind, nothing would remain — that there simply is no sense of “being someone” that exists apart from the specific experiences of our thoughts, feelings, perceptions, etc. According to Dennett, we can be “someone whose left knee feels cold,” or “someone looking at a red apple while trying to yodel” or “someone annoyed by reading multiple examples when just one would have been perfectly clear” — but we can’t be just plain someone.
What seems clear to Chalmers (and to at least one singular Chalmer) is that this isn’t so. And the way we know this isn’t so is precisely because we perceive, more clearly than anything else, that we are someone experiencing all those information processing functions, despite how explicable the functions are in isolation from our experiencing them. Why are we not an internally inert machine that functionally processes and acts on the information without experiencing it any more than an abacus experiences math? “Red” is information, and Dennett is right that we can explain how the brain projects the information of “red” onto its internal movie screen. What we cannot explain is why there is someone in the seat to actually see the movie.
Dennett’s retort is that there is no internal movie screen (“Consciousness cannot be a ‘movie running in the head’”), let alone anybody watching it (“the homunculus who sits in the Cartesian Theater”), and that this sense of being someone is just an illusion. Just as our brains can be fooled into seeing an optical illusion, in other words, we’re all being fooled into thinking that we are someone.
But the (only sane) rejoinder is to say, “Wait a minute! Who — what someone, exactly — is being fooled into thinking that it is someone?! In order to be fooled, first you have to be! You can’t dodge that order of operations. Descartes could’ve told you that 400 years ago!”
Argumentation past this point goes in circles. Descart and Chalmers (et al.) on one side, and Dennett (et al.) on the other, differ not over evidence and argument but over a direct perception — namely, a perception of subjectivity separate from information processing, which the former report having, and the latter report lacking. It’s as if we’re in a courtroom and the two lawyers are arguing not over whether to admit some piece of evidence, or what that evidence means, but about whether or not the courtroom itself (lawyers and all) is real or a child’s diorama, with both sides reduced to gesturing wildly and saying, “Just look around!”
III. What if everything is someone?
Into this deadlocked trench war between dualism and physicalism strides panpsychism!
Panpsychism is the belief that consciousness isn’t something extraordinary within the physical world that happens only in unusual circumstances like brains, such that we need to explain how “inert matter” can give rise to it; rather, says the panpsychist, no matter is ever inert. Everything is conscious. With panpsychism, you don’t have to wonder how consciousness is in your brain and not a rock, because don’t worry, it’s in the rock, too.
Now, that doesn’t mean panpsychists think a rock has memories, dreams, or opinions about your outfit. What it’s like to be a rock must be extremely different from what it’s like to be a person — no physical sensations, no internal sense of time ticking by, no pleasure, no pain, no thoughts, no memories, no goals, no actions, no desires, no emotions — but, according to panpsychism, there is something it is like to be a rock.1 In a panpsychist world, an abacus probably still doesn’t experience math, but in a panpsychist world, an abacus experiences something. To panpsychism, just as everything physical has objective, external properties, everything physical also has subjective, internal properties; there is something it is like to be everything, from a man to a mango, from a whale to a wave, and from the most tremendous quasar to the tiniest quark.
I know. I know.
This sounds loony toons. It sounds cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. It sounds like something to put in your mental filing cabinet in the folder called Thoroughly Insane Bits O’ Woo-Woo That Certain Lovable Nut Jobs Believe, wedged in among things like wheatgrass juice cleanses, anti-Stratfordianism, The Secret/“law of attraction,” “the moon landing was a hoax,” or [insert your political opponents’ favored policy agenda here, HA!, take that].
The thing is, when you look at the evidence we have — and here I mean the inarguable dualist insight that we are someone experiencing the world, paired with the inarguable physicalist insight that our someone-ness is profoundly and predictably affected by our physical brain — panpsychism seems to cover both bases in a way that neither dualism nor physicalism can do on its own. Forgetting religious motivations, forgetting emotional comfort,2 forgetting all other considerations but logic, panpsychism simply seems to be the most rational explanation for the evidence before us about consciousness.
Compare the three options. Everyone agrees that your consciousness is somehow implicated in the 80-ish cubic inches of brain matter housed in your skull. But both the dualist and the physicalist would have you believe that this chunk of matter behaves radically differently than most matter in the universe. The dualist will say that something about the structure or function of that chunk of matter works with some “psychophysical laws” to summon (??) or create (??) some kind of non-physical consciousness. The physicalist will say that this chunk of matter is so complex and self-referential that, despite not really being anyone, it (??) will start to believe (???) that it is someone. The panpsychist story, by comparison, seems simple: Your mind is your brain, and your brain is matter, and it does exactly what all matter everywhere does — i.e., things that can be externally described by physics and internally described by consciousness.
Panpsychism was not entirely off my radar before last year, but until 2023, I had never read or heard the argument for panpsychism spelled out in detail. That changed when I heard this August 2023 podcast episode, in which philosopher Philip Goff explained panpsychism to Coleman Hughes. I was immediately enthralled. I went on to read one of Goff’s books, Galileo’s Error, which I highly recommend, followed by a great many articles and interviews on the subject, not to mention episodes of Goff’s podcast, “Mind Chat.” My entire summary of panpsychism above is just an attempt to summarize Goff’s (better) explanations as best I can remember and synthesize them.
Part of what makes Goff such a credible messenger for panpsychism is that he (unlike me) doesn’t argue for the existence of God. He is not a religious person trying to kasher his religion by dunking it in philosophy. Goff is neither pastor nor Hasid nor hemp-clad Gaia shaman selling edibles behind the farmer’s market. He’s a normie academic philosopher. But the more important part of Goff’s appeal is that he simply makes the arguments very well. Don’t just listen to my summary of panpsychism in this screed; get one of his books from your local bookstore or library, or click right now and listen to the podcast episode. (But I won’t hold my breath. I see the overall click rates for this newsletter, and I forgive you in advance for not clicking.)
The point is that panpsychism solves everything.
But panpsychism also has an enormous problem. And by enormous I mean microscopic.
IV. If everything is someone, how are you just one someone?
Let us now channel our inner VC investor and ask: “But does it scale?”
If consciousness is fundamental to matter, then okay, fine — every subatomic particle in my brain is sentient. But then, how do all those particles add up together into one sentient brain?
I asked Chat GPT how many subatomic particles there are in my brain. After some fairly impressively robust calculations, the robot told me that there are about fifty-five septillion protons, neutrons, and electrons in my brain. Now, remember, we started this whole inquiry with the surest data point we have, and that’s that I know I’m someone. I do not, I assure you, perceive that I am fifty-five septillion different someones. How do we get the sentience of particles combining into sentient atoms combining into sentient neurons combining into sentient me?
That’s “the combination problem” with panpsychism. And, panpsychists will admit, it is a real problem.
I’m not sure it’s the worst problem to have. I am much more willing to believe that I am fifty-five septillion someones being simultaneously fooled into a feeling of being a unitary someone than I am willing to believe that I am no one at all who is being fooled into thinking that it is someone. But it’s not at all obvious how you fool fifty-five septillion someones into thinking they are one someone.
If we take for granted that somehow you can scale up as far as a sentient neuron, then okay, it feels vaguely plausible to me (if still difficult) that a sentient neuron can be in a network with 86 billion of its closest neuron friends (yes, I asked AI again to get the number), and that this network does things in such a way that all members of the network have a persistent, simultaneous illusion together that they are one someone.
But in taking the sentient neuron for granted, we just yadda-yadda’d past the hardest part! How do you scale up as far as a sentient neuron? The neuron itself is networked with other neurons in a special, self-referential, information-processing, strange loopy way, but there’s no reason to think that the particles comprising each neuron have anything like that kind of structure — at least, not in any way that a rock’s particles don’t. In the case of a rock, it’s fine if the answer is that the rock has no unified experience qua rock. A rock might be just a large pile of subatomic particles, each having separate experiences and feeling no shared selfhood or kinship with the others (especially not the second proton to the left over there, that bastard; “positive charge” my ass, more like “passive aggressive charge”). But in the case of a brain, we manifestly perceive the combination.
So how does any neuron (let alone the brain) get a unified consciousness out of its constituent parts to begin with? Why isn’t the only kind of experience in the universe the experience of going “Whee!” while you whirl around a nucleus?3
The combination problem is rightly considered a major obstacle that panpsychism must face. For those willing to credit panpsychism, in fact, the combination problem may be the last remaining barrier to solving the “hard problem” of consciousness.
And yet, now, at long last, I am ready to announce, with all due humility, that I — despite my complete lack of philosophical expertise — have cracked it.
(Actually, Spinoza did first [and, actually, the Torah did before that].)4
V. What if Someone is everything?
“You have been shown, to know, that YHWH, He is ‘the gods;’
there is nothing else but him!”
— Deuteronomy 4:35
“Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived.”
— Spinoza, The Ethics, Part I, Proposition XV.
I have been drawn to pantheism for many years. That is, I believe that God is the ground of all being and that nothing in existence can be separate from Him. When Deuteronomy 4:35 says, “ein od milvado,” many translations call that something like “There are none beside Him,” or “There are no other [gods] beside Him.” Those are plausible translations, but another plausible (literal) translation of “ein od milvado” is “There’s nothing else but Him.”5 There’s a long tradition of Jewish thinkers interpreting those three words in that sense, and my own beliefs follow this path.
Pantheism is very flexible. You can pull it in an immanentist/traditional direction, in which a very traditional and “personal” God pervades the cosmos such that everything is part of Him, even as every one of the biblical miracle stories are literally true; or you can pull in a very reductionist/rationalist direction, in which God is simply a synonym for nature or the universe. (I won’t pretend to be consistent about which direction I go myself, from day to day.) Indeed, the line between the most reductive forms of pantheism and actual atheism is so fine that it can come down to attitude alone, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes in the course of a wee rant on why they don’t think Spinoza should count as a pantheist just because his emotional vibes supposedly weren’t reverent enough:
“Reductive pantheism and atheism maintain extensionally equivalent ontologies… What really distinguishes the pantheist from the atheist is that the pantheist does not reject as inappropriate the religious psychological attitudes demanded by theism. Rather, the pantheist simply asserts that God—conceived as a being before which one is to adopt an attitude of worshipful awe—is or is in Nature.”
In other words, an atheist is just a grumpy pantheist!6
But I digress. The point is, by my lights, Spinoza was a pantheist. He believed that God is the only true “substance” in the universe, and that everything that exists — mind and matter alike — exists only as a “mode” of God. Spinoza’s uses of the terms “substance” and “mode” here are technical and non-intuitive (read it if you dare), and I’m not going to get into them. Instead, I will use a metaphor I have seen in multiple contemporary explanations of Spinoza’s Ethics: God is a pond, and everything that exists in the universe is just a ripple on that pond. A ripple is real in the sense that you can clearly see it and even measure it precisely, but its entire existence is within the pond and utterly dependent on the pond, and there is nothing about it that is not part of the pond. For Spinoza, everything that is, was, and ever will be — everything material and everything mental — is just ripples on the pond that is God.
Fine. Nice idea. But why should anyone believe Spinoza about this?
Well, one reason is that this idea can solve the combination problem, and, by extension, the hard problem of consciousness.
If there's only one “substance” in the universe — undivided and infinite — with every discernible thing in the universe being a “mode” of that substance; and if that one, only, undivided substance has subjectivity / is a Subjective Self; then there is no combination problem, because the one and only Subjective Self is universal and indivisible to begin with. In this theory, there are no micro-proto-consciousnesses that need to somehow combine up into something larger by processes we can’t define; rather, there is only one Consciousness, it is completely undivided, and that is the most basic fact of all existence. The “I” that I know I am is the same being as the “I” that you know you are, which is the same being as the “I” that Gary Busey knows he is. I am you, and you are me, and both of us are Commander, Joe Biden’s dog who keeps biting all the Secret Service agents, and we are also the agents being bitten, and, together, all of us are God. The universe has only one Self to go around.
VI. If we’re all the same Someone, why can’t I read my wife’s mind as she’d prefer?
If there’s only one consciousness in the universe, then that’s grand to have no combination problem, but there arises in its place a new and opposite problem — a division problem! If everything is one consciousness, how do you explain the fact that we each only experience things pertinent to our own individual brains?
At this point in this post, I am on shakier ground (if you can believe it) even than I have been above, since I will no longer be summarizing other (better) thinkers (probably with errors), but, rather, sharing my own meager thoughts, untutored and uncredentialed as they are.
Here’s my theory: There is a sharp divide within our consciousness between our selfhood/someone-ness, which is (imperceptibly) shared, and our information processing, which is exclusive to each of us.
To draw this out, let me refer back to Chalmers v. Dennett. (I’m summarizing in my own words here, and if, in so doing, I’m misunderstanding and misrepresenting them, someone please let me know in the comments.) The key difference between their positions seems to boil down to their answers to this question: If you subtract all the information processing from consciousness, what do you get? Dennett says, “Nothing,” while Chalmers says “experience”. So they actually agree that “consciousness” is divided, and they agree that what’s on one side of the division is radically different from what’s on the other side. Chalmers labels one part “easy problem” (just physical brain processing) and the other part “hard problem” (“experience”) and calls for a dualist addition to the physical picture because of how different experience is from brain processing. Dennett calls one part brain processing, and calls the other part a fantasy/illusion that doesn’t even exist, and you can’t get further apart than that.
It is on that same stark division that I hang my theory.
My first additional step from there is to reframe what Chalmers calls “experience” or “hard problem” functions as “selfhood,” or “someone-ness.” In other words, I think the most important thing to emphasize in the hard problem of consciousness is not “experience” per se — since so much of any given experience comes from the information being processed — but rather, the sense of being someone [who is having the experience]. Having an experience (as a self) may be the only context in which you know you’re a self, but the selfhood itself (sorry) is where the mystery is.
My second, and larger, step is to posit that information processing can be exclusive while selfhood/someone-ness can be shared. Thoughts, perceptions, memories, emotions — Dennett is right that these exist only as information processing within each brain. And, if there weren’t (in my theory) one Universal Self pervading the brain as it pervades all matter, each brain would process this information without subjectively experiencing it, and we would all be philosophical zombies. However (if I’m right), our brains — like everything else in the universe, from dust to dingoes — are (nothing but) part of God, the Universal Self, the Big Someone. Any given chunk of matter has a variety of external attributes, as described by physics; any given chunk of matter also has a level of capacity for information processing, from zero capacity (e.g., a rock) through limited capacity (an amoeba or a microchip) through extensive capacity (a human being); and, by means of each piece of matter with information processing capabilities, the one and only Universal Self simultaneously experiences information in many different and isolated ways. His/its/our attention and cognition are completely siloed, even as His/its/our essential sense of selfhood/someone-ness is universally shared.
To get a better intuitive sense of how one can be shared while the other isn’t, here’s a thought experiment: Two people completely share their information processing. Their brains are physically separate, but, somehow, they overlap 100% at all times in their attention, thoughts, memories, desires, and physical sensations. They are completely united in everything that Chalmers calls “easy problem” functions of the brain (and that Dennett calls the whole shebang of consciousness). How could this mental unity be perceived or demonstrated? Extremely easily; they could get a sense of that in one conversation. Or, rather, a conversation would be completely unnecessary; the two people would wordlessly know the same things as each other, and know that the other knew, etc. They probably wouldn’t even perceive each other as separate people; they would probably perceive the two of them as one “me” with two bodies, and their fusion of information processing would be crystal clear.
Now let’s negate the same case: If the two people in this set began to doubt their complete sharing of information-processing functions, how could it be disproved? Again, very easily. All they’d have to do is come up with one unshared thought, one unshared emotion, one unshared perception, action, choice, etc., and you’d know that these two human beings had distinct (or, at least, partially distinct) systems of information processing.
Now try the same thought experiment with the pure, brute sense of being someone — in isolation from any of the information you’re experiencing. If you wanted either to prove or to disprove that your sense of selfhood/someone-ness was completely shared with another person, how could you do it?
My claim is that you can’t. Not in the thought experiment, not now in real life, not ever. Because what we’re talking about here is something absolutely simple, something absolutely irreducible, and something absolutely distinct from all the information your brain has apart from it — it’s purely the feeling of being someone. And there’s nothing about that feeling that any of us has any reason to be sure is singular or exclusive to us as an individual.
So, again, I’m not saying that you and I have senses of selfhood that are parallel, or alike, or identical in the way that identical twins are identical — I am saying that you and I and everyone else share one and the same sense of selfhood — the same feeling, at the same time, of being (as we are) the same Someone.
If this theory is right, then the physicalists are right that our brain feeds us a persistent illusion, but wrong about the nature of that illusion. Physicalists believe our brain’s information processing adds up to an illusion of consciousness; I believe it adds up to an illusion of separation.
Yes, Someone exists to be “fooled” by our brain processes, and that Someone is God, Nature, the Cosmos, the Universal Self, whatever name you want to use. God can be “fooled” by many brains at the same time, because, while His Selfhood is indivisible, the individual ripple on the pond of God that is an individual brain’s information processing can be divisible and isolated in the same way that all other physical matter can be divisible and isolated — which is to say, discernibly, but in a way that is ultimately illusory. For, as Spinoza and the Torah taught, everything in the world — electrons and elephants as much as sadness or the mental act of remembering a melody — is just a set of finite modes in One Infinite Substance.
Ein od milvado; there is nothing else but Him.
Update!
Prof. David Chalmers kindly replied to a tweet about this article, leading to new insights! Read more here.
Corrections? Rebuttals? Buttals in the first place?
I’m not a philosopher, so I’m probably getting stuff wrong. If so, and you know how, don’t keep it to yourself. Please comment below and educate me!
Thinking about what it would be like to be a rock is a good window into the Artificial Intelligence implications of panpsychism. Because, if panpsychism is true, then the question for AI ethics isn’t the yes-or-no question, “Is AI sentient?” If panpsychism is true, then yes, a microchip running an AI program is sentient, but so is the floor of the server farm where the microchip sits, and so was the chunk of raw silicon before it ever was a microchip. The relevant questions become questions like, “What is it like to be an AI? Can an AI suffer? Does AI experience desire? Does AI fear annihilation or meet death with perfect equanimity?” And many more. We move beyond a simple binary of “sentient or not” and into many, and more interesting, specifics. For more in this vein, in the realm of AI but also abortion, see David Zvi Kalman’s recent post, “Is a Fetus a Person? Is AI? Wrong Question.”
Indeed, I don’t think of panpsychism as a purely comforting idea. Morbidly, if panpsychism is true, then there is also something it is like to be a corpse. Probably nothing to fear per se, because your senses and information processing have gone. But if panpsychism is true, then it is like something. This may (or may not, in itself) lend some extra credence to Jewish practices of treating people’s remains with extreme respect and care, not to mention the degree of centrality rabbinic Judaism assigns the idea of bodily resurrection in the messianic age.
I know, I know, electrons don’t actually whirl around the nucleus! In fact, if quantum field theory is correct, particles aren’t even really particles, they’re just disturbances in a field. So if you’re going to be a nudnik, amend my question to: “Why isn’t the only experience in the universe the experience of being a field that has disturbances?” I hope you’ll agree that even if this sentence is more accurate, it’s less fun.
My preferred full translation of that verse (which differs from the standard translations) would be: “You have been shown, to know, that YHWH, He is ‘the gods;’ there is nothing else but Him!” The verse is either (A) a double-barreled statement of monotheism, in which the second half just reinforces the first half’s point that what the polytheistic world thinks are multiple gods are really just One God; or (B) a statement that takes the listener on a journey from (first half) realizing that the surrounding culture’s supposed many gods conceal a hidden Unity, through (second half) upping the ante by revealing that all plurality in the world conceals the ultimate Hidden Unity. I lean, obviously, toward (B).
I keep thinking there’s got to be a funnier version of this quip. An atheist is just: A hangry pantheist? A pantheist who failed poetry class? A pantheist who resents his parents? Help me out in the comments, I know it can be better.
If I follow you correctly, I agree with all of it up to the end part of God is fooled. How does that happen? So I take the problem for the idealist or consciousness monist to be - how has God, the singular subject, the ground of all being, the omniscient, become singular subjects like you and me?
Fascinating, thoughtful, and well-written piece. I do wonder, however, if the problem with which you are grappling is really faith vs. agnosticism rather than atheism vs. pantheism. The problem of consciousness is at this point scientifically unanswerable so the answers are only "I don't know" or "it's God."