Philip Goff - Panpsychism is crazy, but it’s also most probably true
Common sense tells us
that only living things have an inner life. Rabbits and tigers and mice have
feelings, sensations and experiences; tables and rocks and molecules do not.
Panpsychists deny this datum of common sense. According to panpsychism, the
smallest bits of matter – things such as electrons and quarks – have very basic
kinds of experience; an electron has an inner life.
The main objection made to panpsychism is that it is ‘crazy’
and ‘just obviously wrong’. It is thought to be highly counterintuitive to
suppose that an electron has some kind of inner life, no matter how basic, and
this is taken to be a very strong reason to doubt the truth of panpsychism. But
many widely accepted scientific theories are also crazily counter to common
sense. Albert Einstein tells us that time slows down at high speeds. According
to standard interpretations of quantum mechanics, particles have determinate
positions only when measured. And according to Charles Darwin’s theory of
evolution, our ancestors were apes. All of these views are wildly at odds with
our common-sense view of the world, or at least they were when they were first
proposed, but nobody thinks this is a good reason not to take them seriously.
Why should we take common sense to be a good guide to how things really are?
No doubt the
willingness of many to accept special relativity, natural selection and quantum
mechanics, despite their strangeness from the point of view of pre-theoretical
common sense, is a reflection of their respect for the scientific method. We
are prepared to modify our view of the world if we take there to be good
scientific reason to do so. But in the absence of hard experimental proof,
people are reluctant to attribute consciousness to electrons.
Yet scientific support
for a theory comes not merely from the fact that it explains the evidence, but
from the fact that it is the best explanation of the evidence,
where a theory is ‘better’ to the extent that it is more simple, elegant and
parsimonious than its rivals. Suppose we have two theories – Theory A and
Theory B – both of which account for all observations, but Theory A postulates
four kinds of fundamental force while Theory B postulates 15 kinds of
fundamental force. Although both theories account for all the data of
observation, Theory A is to be preferred as it offers a more parsimonious
account of the data. To take a real-world example, Einstein’s theory of special
relativity supplanted the Lorentzian theory that preceded it, not because
Einstein’s theory accounted for any observations that the Lorentzian theory
could not account for, but because Einstein provided a much simpler and
more elegant explanation of the relevant observations.
I maintain that there
is a powerful simplicity argument in favour of panpsychism. The argument relies
on a claim that has been defended by Bertrand Russell, Arthur Eddington and
many others, namely that physical science doesn’t tell us what matter is,
only what it does. The job of physics is to provide us with
mathematical models that allow us to predict with great accuracy how matter
will behave. This is incredibly useful information; it allows us to manipulate
the world in extraordinary ways, leading to the technological advancements that
have transformed our society beyond recognition. But it is one thing to know
the behaviour of an electron and quite another to know its intrinsic
nature: how the electron is, in and of itself. Physical science gives us
rich information about the behaviour of matter but leaves us completely in the
dark about its intrinsic nature.
In fact, the only
thing we know about the intrinsic nature of matter is that some of it – the
stuff in brains – involves experience. We now face a theoretical choice. We
either suppose that the intrinsic nature of fundamental particles involves
experience or we suppose that they have some entirely unknown intrinsic nature.
On the former supposition, the nature of macroscopic things is continuous with
the nature of microscopic things. The latter supposition leads us to
complexity, discontinuity and mystery. The theoretical imperative to form as
simple and unified a view as is consistent with the data leads us quite
straightforwardly in the direction of panpsychism.
In the public mind,
physics is on its way to giving us a complete picture of the nature of space,
time and matter. While in this mindset, panpsychism seems improbable, as physics
does not attribute experience to fundamental particles. But once we realise
that physics tells us nothing about the intrinsic nature of the entities it
talks about, and indeed that the only thing we know for certain about the
intrinsic nature of matter is that at least some material things have
experiences, the issue looks very different. All we get from physics is this
big black-and-white abstract structure, which we must somehow colour in with
intrinsic nature. We know how to colour in one bit of it: the brains of
organisms are coloured in with experience. How to colour in the rest? The most
elegant, simple, sensible option is to colour in the rest of the world with the
same pen.
Panpsychism is crazy.
But it is also highly likely to be true.
Philip Goff is associate professor
in philosophy at Central European University in Budapest. His research
interest is in consciousness and he blogs at www.conscienceandconsciousness.com.
