Update: Chalmers, Chalmer, & Consciousness

No, that's not a law firm.

News from the Consciousness Beat…

Well, not really news, but news to me.

Following up on my previous post, “Brain, Mind, & Self,” I took to Twitter/X to summarize my argument and see if any real philosophers would care to correct me, if I were wrong. And, without daring to hope much for a reply, I tagged the world’s premiere expert on consciousness, Prof. David Chalmers — with the following results:

1. He actually replied!

2. His reply was something other than “You are thoroughly unhinged and should seek medical attention for the safety of yourself and others”!

3. I learned (as I ought to have expected) that the idea I arrived at independently is not new…

4. …But it is an idea that Prof. Chalmers takes quite seriously.

The paper Chalmers links is here, and it’s fascinating. Published in 2019, it explores varieties of idealism — the notion that reality is entirely mental.¹ My favorite part of the paper is its conclusion, which I will here quote in its entirety (throughout this post, emphasis in bold is mine):

Conclusion

I do not claim that idealism is plausible. No position on the mind–body problem is plausible. Materialism is implausible. Dualism is implausible. Idealism is implausible. Neutral monism is implausible. None-of-the-above is implausible. But the probabilities of all of these views get a boost from the fact that one of them must be true. Idealism is not greatly less plausible than its main competitors. So even though idealism is implausible, there is a non-negligible probability that it is true.

This is, prima facie, delightful. But what’s even more interesting (and validating) to me is that, even though he considers all options problematic, when discussing my preferred theory, Chalmers seems to find it to be among the least problematic options. He offers objections to it, but it seems to me that he offers much stronger objections to the other options.

And, more to the point I want to make now, I don’t personally find any of the objections Chalmers offers convincing.

The Chalmers objections

Here’s Chalmers discussing what I had thought of as pantheistic/monistic panpsychism, which he calls “identity cosmopsychism,” and which he identifies as part of a larger group of approaches he calls “cosmic idealism.” (This idea, in short, is that the whole universe consists of one Mind.) Explaining what I had called a “division problem” and what he calls a “constitution problem” (if we’re all the same Someone, how do we seem to have separate minds), he writes:

“A natural strategy here suggests that the cosmic subject undergoes some sort of cognitive fragmentation into different components, modes, or guises, each of which lacks access to the other components. Kastrup (2017) suggests an analogy with dissociative identity disorder (DID): in effect, each macrosubject [i.e., each regular mind like you or me] is an alter (of many multiple personalities) of the cosmic subject…

Of course this view raises many questions. There are many disanalogies between the universe and a DID subject, and it is not at all clear how to find analogues within-subject fragmentation at the level of cognitive processes in the universe. The view is also massively revisionary about our minds and our relations to one another. It makes our ordinary mode of existence pathological, since in this mode we are unaware of the vast majority of experiences we are having. This entails a massive failure of introspection, where our ordinary beliefs reflect a near-complete lack of knowledge about our own consciousness. This failure is at least uncomfortable for people who are realists about consciousness… Still, identity cosmopsychism along with cognitive fragmentation seems a coherent view that is worth taking seriously.

Later, summing up, he writes:

Overall, I think cosmic idealism is the most promising version of idealism, and is about as promising as any version of panpsychism. It should be on the list of the handful of promising approaches to the mind-body problem.

The Chalmer rebuttals

Here’s why Chalmers’s objections don’t dissuade me from my enthusiasm for what I will now (following Chalmers) call “identity cosmopsychism with cognitive fragmentation.”

1. Cognitive fragmentation isn’t “pathological” and the analogy to mental illness isn’t load-bearing.

Chalmers writes that this theory “makes our ordinary mode of existence pathological.” As far as I can tell, the only source for the charge of pathology is that when Bernardo Kastrup (introduced? discussed?) this idea in 2017, he used “dissociation” as his analogy/terminology for the cosmic subject experiencing information processing that is siloed within individual minds, explicitly citing a mental health disorder (Dissociative Identity Disorder) as an example. His analogy was chosen, presumably, for its denotation of siloed cognition within one mind and not for its connotations of disease.

Let’s bracket the question of whether dissociative identity disorder even exists.² It doesn’t matter; either way, Kastrup needn’t have chosen that analogy. The connotations of disease are in no way necessary to the idea of a unified cosmic subjectivity. If the idea is true, then it’s entirely natural — God / the Cosmic Subject has many mutually exclusive experiences, all at once, through the means of existing simultaneously within many different information-processing units (brains, microchips, etc.). If that’s true, then it’s not a disease, it’s just reality.

Rather than analogizing to disease, we could just as well analogize to something positive — perhaps an immersive virtual reality entertainment experience that exceeds our current technological capacities, in which one person could experience the same story from one character’s perspective and then another, with such a degree of immersion that, during each round, they forget their identity beyond the experience. True, in that case, the VR experience would be neither permanent nor simultaneous, which makes the analogy incomplete. But one or both of the same points might be true for the DID analogy, too.

Regardless, one must be able to imagine that if the whole cosmos has experiences, they may be such that no human analogy can apprehend them. As Chalmers himself writes (page 20):

What are the cosmic experiences like? We need not take a stand here… perhaps most likely, these states may be quite unlike any human experience…

Beyond the specific challenges of analogies from the human to the cosmic scale, we shouldn’t ask too much of analogies in general; their job is not to uphold a theory, but simply to help us understand it. From there, we can disassemble the scaffolding of analogy and let the theory stand or fall on its own. In this case, I see no reason that Kastrup’s choice of “dissociation” as an analogy makes the underlying theory any less plausible. (Perhaps especially because I arrived at the same idea before I ever encountered that analogy.)

2. There is no failure of introspection.

Chalmers writes that identity cosmopsychism with cognitive fragmentation “entails a massive failure of introspection, where our ordinary beliefs reflect a near-complete lack of knowledge about our own consciousness.”

To answer this, I want to start by distinguishing between two theoretical kinds of “failures of introspection”. One kind would be false introspection — we perceive something inwardly that is actually false. Another kind would be incomplete introspection — we perceive some of the truth about our consciousness, but not the whole truth.

Note that Chalmers doesn’t claim that this theory entails false introspection; he only claims that it entails incomplete introspection. That’s an important limitation to the objection, right from the jump! However, Chalmers does imply that a cosmic subject undergoing cognitive fragmentation would be incomplete introspection of a particularly severe (“massive”) kind, since it reflects “a near-complete lack of knowledge about our own consciousness.” The unstated implication is that if we are the same someone as everyone else, we somehow ought to share their cognition as much as we share their sense of someone-ness/self. Or, perhaps, that we ought to directly perceive the fact of our shared selfhood.

But I think that tacit expectation, in either form, is unreasonable.

Part of the confusion here is that this theory renders identity a bit slippery. What work is the word “our” doing in the phrase “knowledge about our own consciousness”? Each of us is an individual, and each of us also “is” —or, rather, is one part of — the cosmos. We’re the whole on one level, and, on another level, we’re specific parts. But let’s hold expectations consistent across those levels. To the extent and in the ways that we’re individual parts, our knowledge should be partial; and, to the extent and in the ways that we’re the whole, our knowledge should be complete. How can Chalmers say we have “a near-complete lack of knowledge about our own consciousness”? “Our consciousness” is only “ours” to the extent that it’s either exclusive to us or shared, and (according to cognitive fragmentation) we directly perceive 100% of the part that is shared (as well as what’s exclusive to us, of course). Looking within ourselves, we perceive a bunch of cognitive stuff like sensations, memories, thoughts, emotions, etc. — those things seem exclusive to us, and those things are exclusive to us — and then, separately, we also perceive an utterly simple, brute sense of being someone. That’s the only part that’s shared beyond the boundaries of our skulls (in this theory), and we perceive it directly and completely! True, we don’t directly perceive the abstract fact that our selfhood is shared with others, but that’s because once we’re talking about knowing facts, we’ve already slipped into the realm of cognition — which isn’t shared. The part that is shared is un-fact-like; we perceive our someone-ness in its indivisible and indescribable simplicity.

There’s nothing missing in this theory, nothing that we (the individual human) reasonably should be expected to access but cannot access. So I simply disagree with Chalmers that there is any failure of introspection, of either kind. There’s no false introspection and there’s no incomplete introspection, either.

3. Okay, yes, this is counterintuitive. But so are the alternatives.

Chalmers writes that this theory is “massively revisionary about our minds and our relations to one another.”

To this I can only reply: Yes. Yeah. Absolutely. No argument there.

But the strongest answer to this objection has already been provided by Chalmers himself: “No position on the mind–body problem is plausible.”

We’re shopping among absurd possibilities here; this is the only store in town and they don’t carry anything non-absurd. The question before us is: What is least absurd?

That’s a question to which the adage “de gustibus non disputandum est” vigorously applies. For my money, though, identity cosmopsychism with cognitive fragmentation is now, by far, the most plausible explanation of reality that I have ever come across. I don’t hold either dualism or materialism as being out of the realm of possibility; I simply find them far less plausible than this alternative.

I’m deeply grateful to Prof. Chalmers for replying!

1. In framing my post on consciousness, I paid no attention to the question of idealism, as I didn’t find that to be central to the point I wanted to make. My preferred theory of consciousness is compatible with idealism, but doesn’t strictly require idealism. That is, it could be true that we’re all part of a God who is entirely mental, or it could be true that we’re all part of God who has both mental and non-mental aspects. I will admit that I do find the idealist version to be simpler (as well as more aligned with the monotheist tradition), and therefore more intuitively appealing to me than the alternative.

2. The reader may count me as a bit less skeptical of the existence of DID than Freddie deBoer is, but a good deal more skeptical of its existence than a TikTok influencer “system” with 17 diverse and videogenic alters.