Belief in Qualia as Properly Basic (Version 2)

 Belief in Qualia as Properly Basic (Version 2)

This is an edited and updated version of my post "Belief in Qualia as Properly Basic" [https://ghostlightphilosophy.blogspot.com/2021/03/belief-in-qualia-as-properly-basic.html] 

Introduction

Arguments from eliminative materialists try to claim that qualia do not exist because they cannot fit within a behaviouristic framework of mind. They observe that the issue of qualia strengthens the mind-body problem which undercuts materialistic and behaviouristic explanations of mind. Attacks on qualia have grown in recent years as they have tried to be reduced to mechanical neurological interactions (Dennett, 1991 , Dennett, 1998) or reduced to feedback of emotions (Solms, 2021). Here, I want to articulate my view that belief in the real existence (where real existence means that they exist in exactly what we think they are) of qualia can be defended as properly basic. I will first outline what properly basic beliefs are and then defend my view that the existence of qualia can be defended as such. Finally I will respond to four anticipated objections to my argument.

1 – What are basic beliefs?

Basic beliefs are a key part of foundationalism in epistemology, as they form the very ‘foundation’ of the belief system that foundationalists hold. These are the very axioms of a belief system and do not depend upon justification of other beliefs but on something outside of the realm of belief. The justification for these is non-propositional, meaning that no propositional attitude is needed to justify them. The agent does not need to have sufficient external justification for their basic belief because they operate at the very foundation of their belief system. This makes an external justification or grounding impossible since the external justification would become more basic than the basic belief. You can use external evidence to reinforce the truth of a basic belief but not to ground them. For example, 2+2=4 is considered a basic belief. It cannot be grounded in the fact that when I put 2 marbles and 2 books in a box that there are 4 objects in the box, but this can be used to reinforce the truth of the basic belief that 2+2=4. It is perfectly rational to hold basic beliefs without them being based on other beliefs or propositions.

Basic beliefs are usually broken into three categories…

1.       Ones which are directly evident to the senses. For example, sense experience.

2.       Ones that are incorrigible (necessarily true simply in virtue of being believed). For example, logical truths or mathematical axioms.

3.       Ones that are self-evident. For example, ‘I exist’.

Qualia would fit more into groups 1 and 3 rather than 2 but they can also fit within the incorrigible category, as I will explain later.

From this and my research, what follows is my checklist for whether a belief is basic and then we can compare the justification for qualia to this list…

·         Form the axioms or foundations of a belief system.

·         Do not depend upon external or propositional justification.

·         Are self-evident.

·         Are directly evident to the senses.

·         Are incorrigible.

2 – When do basic beliefs become properly basic?

A properly basic belief is simply a belief that is held on good epistemic warrant and is one which you are warranted to believe. That’s all really. Properly basic simply means that it is a justified basic belief, but again the justification does not come from any external source or relation to another propositional belief. In the checklist given at the end of section 1, the last three criteria are what make a belief go from basic to properly basic. Therefore, if any of the last three criteria are met in conjunction with the first two, the belief is properly basic.

3 – What are qualia?

Qualia are hard to define but easy to identify once experienced. There are many different definitions given in the literature. One is simply “phenomenal character”. Another is “properties of sense data”. A third is “intrinsic, non-representational properties”. And a fourth is “intrinsic, nonphysical, ineffable properties”. What all of these have in common is that they can characterise qualia as including…

·         Perceptual experiences (seeing red, hearing glass smash, tasting chilli, smelling farmyards and feeling a cactus thorn).

·         Bodily sensations (feeling an itch, feeling a muscle spasm, feeling a pain, feeling dizzy, etc…)

·         Felt reactions (feeling delight, lust, love, fear, etc…)

·         Felt moods (feeling elated, depressed, bored, jealous, calm, etc…)

All of the above examples are counted as qualia.

In addition, in his 1998 essay ‘Quining Qualia’, Dennett says that for qualia to have any real existence, they must have the following four properties…

1.       Being ineffable (too great or extreme to be described in words).

2.       Being intrinsic (belonging naturally and directly to something or someone).

3.       Being private (only accessible from the 1^st person perspective).

4.       Being directly or immediately apprehensible in consciousness.

For example, the quale of experiencing the redness of an apple. It is too great to be described in words. I can write a whole book on what the redness feels to me through using words, but it will not capture in any sense how it felt to me. There is an extra dimension to their reality which cannot be articulated and understood by any reader. This makes it ineffable. The redness of the apple as a quale would be intrinsic in the fact that it would only be accessible to the perceiver. I could not in principle access your quale of the redness because if I did it would become my quale and not yours anymore. The privateness of the redness also follows closely from this. The redness of the apple as a quale must also be directly or immediately apprehensible, meaning that I must be able to directly/immediately become aware of and understand my quale of the redness.

From my research, I have deduced a definition of qualia which I think best encompasses the truth of their experience and the criteria outlined, is…

Qualia are introspectively or directly accessible, private, phenomenal aspects of our mental lives.

Running from Nagel’s “What is it like to be a bat?” essay, qualia also give us the knowledge of ‘what it feels like to…”.

When I say that qualia are “introspectively or directly accessible” I mean that through using introspection, you can be directly aware of them. In addition, some qualia will be directly accessible in your meta-consciousness (what is often called higher order consciousness). You do not, and cannot need, a scientific experiment or third person observer in order to give you any extra epistemic justification for the reality of qualia. Qualia being defined as “private” necessarily follows on from this but I want to highlight this point because it is important. As mentioned before when outlining the redness of an apple, I by definition cannot access your qualia or know how the redness of the apple felt to you. If your qualia were transplanted into me and I experienced it, it would no longer be your qualia but my qualia. All experiences coming through our dissociative boundaries get altered or impinged upon in some way and no two impingements will be exactly the same. Therefore, I cannot ever know what the redness of an apple, or any qualia, feels to you. This makes them “private”. The “phenomenal aspects of our mental lives” characterises what makes our minds so distinct from matter. Qualia cannot be given a quantitative description, or even be described in common language where the reader would gain any knowledge about how X feels. The idea of the “phenomenal aspects” simply refers to the component parts of mind.

Now I have given an overview of what qualia are and the definition of qualia I am sticking to [Qualia are introspectively or directly accessible, private, phenomenal aspects of our mental lives], I will now get on to defending my basic thesis that belief in qualia can be defended as properly basic, contrary to eliminative critiques of qualia from Dennett, Frankish and the Churchlands.

4 – Why belief in qualia is properly basic.

So can introspectively or directly accessible, private, phenomenal aspects of our mental lives (qualia) be justified as having real existence in a properly basic manner? I will argue that they can.

As I briefly articulated in my post titled “The Illusion of Time”, the proper way to beginning to understand consciousness is what I call the White Mind state. This is a state where we remove all inferences and models we use to make sense of things from our minds, and stay right in what are directly and immediately aware of. We need to remove all explanatory models which rely on inferences, such as materialism (since the idea of matter is an inference we use to make sense of sense experience). We should only keep the things which are so direct and immediate it is impossible to doubt their reality to our senses. Sense experience, qualia and consciousness are the only things left when you are in the White Mind state. Sense experience and qualia are just experience at the end of the day, and our meta-conscious awareness gives us the knowing and introspective awareness of this experience. Therefore, all there is on the White Mind state is experience and the knowing of experience.

The White Mind state is absolutely necessary to understanding the true nature of consciousness because it allows us to understand how it operates and presents itself to us. None of this information can be gained through MRI scanners or neuro-mapping. The raw feels and experiences of consciousness can only be known through introspection. Therefore, the White Mind state is absolutely necessary in order to get a complete picture of the true nature of consciousness.

Where do qualia fit in to the WM (White Mind) state? Remember that qualia are “introspectively or directly accessible, private, phenomenal aspects of our mental lives.” When we are in the WM state, all we have is sense experience, qualia and consciousness.

Is this not begging the question you may ask since I assume that qualia are part of the WM state? No it is not because we now only need to look at the definitions. In the WM state, are there introspectively or directly accessible, private, phenomenal aspects of our mental lives? Yes, that is entirely what composes us in the WM state – experience (phenomenal aspects of mental lives which are directly accessible and private) and the knowing of experience (introspection and the awareness of the experience espoused just before). So, when we get ourselves into the WM state by removing unnecessary inferences and models, the realty of qualia becomes self-evident. It is a lunatic’s game to deny the reality of qualia when the most basic aspect of our being is analysed. The only thing which has bred so much scepticism around qualia is unnecessary explanatory models such as materialism.

But can this be defended in a properly basic way? I will now refer back to the checklist of what must be fulfilled for a belief to be properly basic…

·         Form the axioms or foundations of a belief system.

·         Do not depend upon external or propositional justification.

·         Are self-evident.

·         Are directly evident to the senses.

·         Are incorrigible.

The first two criteria mut be filled jointly in order for the belief in qualia to be basic and then at least one of the last three in order for it to graduate as properly basic. The more criteria that are met, the stronger the properly basic justification becomes.

In the WM state, are qualia espoused above the formation of the axioms or foundations of our belief system? Yes! This is because they constitute the most fundamental aspects of our consciousness – the most basic aspect of ourselves. All other models (such as materialism) are formed within consciousness. Any theory which accounts for consciousness must start with consciousness in order to explain it and in order to start with it you need to see what it is actually composed of. Since we always start with consciousness from an epistemic standpoint, and qualia make up our consciousness, qualia do epistemically function at the very foundation of the belief system we make up. Again, it is only unnecessary explanatory models that remove qualia from this cherished position in the epistemic landscape. Both epistemically and ontologically, qualia are the literal basis of any theory of consciousness. Any theory which begins with matter and tries to reduce mind to matter is trying to reduce consciousness to an abstraction made within consciousness in order to explain itself. Any theory which violates the WM state will miss out on crucial self-evident, directly and immediately accessible aspects of consciousness. Therefore, any behaviourist account of consciousness, will be at the very least incomplete and at worse, wholly false.

Next, do qualia not depend upon external justification to believe in their existence? Yes! It would be impossible for them to have an external justification which is more certain than qualia which could offer as an epistemic grounding for them. It would be like building a house on a sandcastle. Therefore, the first two criteria have been met and belief in qualia is at this point basic at least.

Matching the third and fourth points to this – qualia are self-evident upon a close reflection of consciousness and are directly evident to the senses of our consciousness. What is not more self-evident and directly evident to the senses than the raw feeling of redness or the raw feeling of pain? All the phenomenal aspects of our mental lives are self-evident to anyone with a mind and are directly evident to our senses. This matches the third and fourth criteria, graduating the basic belief to properly basic already.

But are they incorrigible? It would mean that they cannot be corrected or doubted, and are true simply in virtue of being believed. Now one objection – the illusions and hallucinations objection – could be levelled against this by arguing that we can be mistaken about the content of our experience and qualia, but (1) I will deal with this in section 5 and (2) it is not relevant anyway. Whether what we believe the content of the qualia to be is correspondent to reality or not, the fact that we are having qualia experience and a phenomenal aspect of our lives shows that the mere existence of qualia is incorrigible. We could doubt whether the content of qualia is known, but we first need to know that we are experiencing qualia before we can doubt their content. The basic fact that we experience qualia is undeniable. One cannot experience qualia and yet rationally doubt their existence or try to correct the fact that they exist. So yes, the existence of qualia is incorrigible.

This to me seems to satisfy all the necessary components for something to qualify as a properly basic belief. We have good first-hand epistemic warrant to believe in the reality of qualia. Therefore, belief in qualia is indeed properly basic.

5 – Responses to four anticipated objections.

No doubt my argument will have certain responses and objections. I wish to answer the main four I am anticipating in order to further defend my thesis.

5A – Qualia do not exist.

This will be the most popular objection I am anticipating to my thesis that belief in qualia can be properly basic. Eliminativists such as the Churchlands, Dennett and Frankish argue that consciousness is simply an illusion created by the brain. The brain plays tricks all the time and qualia is just another one of them. Therefore, they all argue that qualia do not exist in any real sense. However all arguments against the existence of qualia are violations of the White Mind state. They have to rely on the unnecessary explanatory abstraction and inference of materialism and then argue that materialism is primary and that combinations of matter which produce brains go on to produce the illusion of consciousness. All of Dennett’s (1991, 1998) arguments against qualia explicitly assume the truth of the explanatory models of both materialism and behaviourism – both I heavily dispute. (I will be making a blog post critique of behaviourism in the future).

But why shouldn’t people violate the White Mind state? Is introspection and direct and immediate experience really enough to tell us about the true nature of consciousness? Yes. Introspection is the most privileged access we will ever have to the mystery of consciousness. Any behaviouristic account of consciousness is only looking at the 3^rd person observable effects of consciousness, therefore it will necessarily be watered down and at best, incomplete. How can this be more privileged to knowing the true nature and qualitative dimensions of consciousness which are so self-evident to all of us? A dogmatic attachment to unnecessary explanatory models will not get us closer to truth.

In short, any argument against the real existence of qualia is assuming either (1) materialism, (2) behaviourism or (3) both materialism and behaviourism. Doing either of the three is a violation of the White Mind state, or some will take the direct approach and violate the White Mind state explicitly. Therefore, all arguments saying that qualia do not exist are epistemically invalid.

5B – There are no properly basic beliefs.

This objection mainly comes from anti-foundationalists such as coherentists. They claim that there are no foundational beliefs such as basic beliefs. One alternative view is to say that beliefs form some kind of “web” (Quine, 1970) although Quine held that logic and mathematics were at the center of the web, acting as the pseudo-foundation of the web of belief. However, I hold that even anti-foundationalism falls back into foundationalism in the following way. Anti-foundationalists believe that their ‘web of belief’ or system of coherent propositions is the grounds for their knowledge of whether a new proposition is true. This is, in my opinion, their properly basic belief. This axiom forms the foundation of their belief system, it does not depend upon external justification, and is self-evident from looking at their very system. Anti-foundationalists cannot doubt that a true proposition is one which coheres with other propositions. This is their properly basic belief. This objection will need to be considered in more detail though I think that the majority of philosophers hold some kind of properly basic belief (logical truths or mathematical axioms are the most popular choices). In the White Mind state, consciousness, qualia and sense experience would replace logic as the most properly basic beliefs, or under anti-foundationalism, they would be what is at the center of the new ‘web of belief’. In short, every epistemic worldview has some properly basic belief that almost serves as their dogma. There is no escaping this.

In addition, to say that there are no properly basic beliefs is to say that consciousness as a medium is no more epistemically primary than anything else. It functions no more crucially within a coherent web of belief than any other proposition or fact. However, all facts, beliefs and propositions are contained within our consciousness when forming the coherent web of belief. Therefore, consciousness as a medium, and all of its related self-evident contents, must function at a more epistemically primary position than other things. Therefore, even under anti-foundationalism, it cannot be doubted that consciousness is epistemically primary, or properly basic under both systems of justification.

5C – Issues with illusions and hallucinations.

The issue of illusions and hallucinations can be put against this argument in the following way. Since we know that sometimes we have illusions and hallucinations with regards to the content of our sense experience (for example an oasis in a desert or a broken straw in a glass of water), we could therefore be equally deceived about the existence of qualia itself. It would just be another one of the brain’s tricks. However this objection holds little weight because even if we are being deceived about the contents of our qualia, it is undeniable that there are qualia. The White Mind state reveals this to us perfectly through direct and immediate ideas.

Let’s take a look at Dennett’s famous ‘alternative neurosurgery thought experiment’ to illustrate the point. Dennett’s argument was as follows…

One day you find yourself awake after neurosurgery to find that your qualia have been inverted. For example, the grass now appears red and the night sky appears white. It follows that you should be immediately aware that something had gone terribly wrong during the surgery. However, Dennett argues that it would be impossible to distinguish as to whether the neurosurgeons have inverted your qualia or just inverted a connection to memories of past qualia. Therefore, we cannot know whether there has been a change in your “immediately apprehensible qualia”. It is clear to see that this does not undermine belief in qualia for the following reason. It might be hard to distinguish between which the true content of the qualia but it does not follow that qualia do not exist. All Dennett has illustrated here is that the inverted spectrum is indeed possible. Nowhere does it follow that qualia do not exist. We could be, in theory, deceived about the content of our qualia and whether we have had ours inverted also, but the conclusion of “Therefore qualia do not exist” does not follow from Dennett’s thought experiment.

The objection may seem stronger with hallucinations because with those we experience something that doesn’t actually exist in the real world. However this seems to be assuming some kind of indirect materialist style realism. Idealism on the other hand would say that sometimes inner experience and memories can impinge in an extrinsic manner onto your dissociative boundary and Markov blanket, and this impingement from the inside can recreate in low resolution a hallucinatory image. The image is in your mind as we would usually diagnose it to be but it is more real then in any indirect materialist style realism. Just like how visual cortex stimulation can create involuntary mental images, extrinsic impingement can also do this under idealism. In short, whilst the exact content of our qualia could be up for debate, there is no doubt that there are qualia and we experience them directly and immediately.

5D – The justification for qualia given here is not properly basic.

The final objection I am anticipating is that my justification given the White Mind state is not actually properly basic because you need to experience the qualia in order to know that they exist. The objector may say that belief in qualia depends on an external justification, mainly the very experience of them. However the objector here is misunderstanding what ‘external justification’ means. The term ‘external’ refers to another belief or proposition that you would use in order to justify belief in a new proposition. This occurs on either a foundationalist account or coherentist account of justification. When justifying our belief in qualia, we first start out with a belief in them because we experience them and then our justification for our belief doesn’t rely on another distinct external proposition. It relies on the self-evident, direct and immediate nature of qualia. We might be deceived about their specific contents (5C) but it is undeniable that qualia exist. The justification is entirely basic and leads to a properly basic belief in qualia.

6 – Conclusion

Here, I have presented by thesis that belief in qualia (introspectively or directly accessible, private, phenomenal aspects of our mental lives) can be justified as properly basic based on the White Mind state and the nature of properly basic beliefs. I have also considered four possible objections to my view and offered responses to them. Therefore I believe that belief in qualia can be properly basic, which serves as a defeater to any eliminativist or illusionist argument against their real existence.

The Damning Interaction Problem – Response to Joe Schmid

The Damning Interaction Problem – Response to Joe Schmid

Introduction

Joe Schmid runs the YouTube channel ‘Majesty of Reason’ and a blog titled with the same name. Here, I will be responding to a blog post (https://majestyofreason.wordpress.com/2019/11/11/theories-of-mind-part-4-the-interaction-problem/ ) he made regarding the interaction problem against substance dualism. I will only be responding to the second section of the blog post since I agree with Joe’s characterisation of the interaction problem, where in the second half Joe tries to remove some mystery from the interaction problem.

1 – Commentary

In the beginning, Joe says the following…

To see why the interaction problem is not as mysterious as we might initially think, consider physical causation. What is physical causation? I aver that there is a deep mystery here, a mystery that parallels dualism’s interaction problem.

Just think about it. What is this mysterious relation of “production” whereby one object (event) causes another object (event) to exist (happen)? How does that even occur? We can specify the shapes of the objects, their spatial contiguity, their colour, their relative velocities, their kinetic and potential energy, and so on, but where is causality in this specification? In which of these facts does causation consist? To which of these facts could we point?

Joe then goes on to lay out the exact problem of describing physical causation through analogies to billiard balls. However, the first issue here is that Joe claims that the problem of physical causation “parallels” the interaction problem from dualism. This claim is false. I agree that there is a huge problem with trying to give a wholly inclusive definition of causation, which has led many to claim that causation is primitive or that belief in physical causation can be basic. It is already hard enough to explain how one physical and material item can interact with another physical and material item, but going from to a non-physical and non-material item interacting with a physical and material item makes the problem ten times worse. The force behind the interaction problem is that we are going from one ontological category to a wholly distinct ontological category. Descartes’ categories of soul and matter have no common properties to use to interact with in the firs place. This is why I dispute the claim that there is a parallel between the hardness of defining physical causation and the question of how a non-physical and non-material entity interacts with a physical and material item where they have no common properties. His objection is almost tu quoque where he is saying that he acknowledges that there is an interaction problem but that its not so bad because materialism has it too.

Next, Joe says the following…

So, it seems we have some reason to be primitivists about causation. But if that is true, then physical-physical causation seems to be every bit as “mysterious” as non-physical-physical causation. Under such an account, both are equally primitive, irreducible, and basic.

My issue here is that just because the interaction of causation would be equally primitive on both accounts, it doesn’t follow that there are both equally mysterious. As said before, going from physical to physical is one issue, but going from non-physical to physical only amplifies the problem. At least with physical to physical, the items have common properties and are of the same ontological category. With non-physical to physical, the items have no common properties and are of distinct ontological categories. I am failing to see how there is such a symmetry of the mysteriousness here.

Joe concludes his blog post by saying…

A final note in relation to the interaction problem concerns the very nature of how questions. Usually, when we pose a how question, we seek a mechanistic explanation of how one phenomenon gives rise to or interacts with another phenomenon. But, by definition, the immaterial mind is not some mechanistic thing with parts arranged and operating in mechanical ways. But if that is true, then demanding a how explanation in relation to the mind’s activity is (one may argue) a category error.

Joe says that when we ask how questions we usually seek some mechanistic explanation of how phenomena interact. However if we cannot seek this sort of explanation for how a soul interacts with the body then we are left with no explanation, not even an in principle explanation, for how the soul could interact with the body. Asking how a non-spatial, non-temporal, non-material, non-physical soul can interact with a physical body is like asking how does the absolute nothing create something. Substance dualism here has NO explanatory power or descriptive resources at all. Material causality may be primitive and hard to define but it is no where into the depth of despair as the substance dualist’s position.

2 – Conclusion

My main disagreement with Joe here is that the problem of describing material causation is not symmetrical or parallel with the interaction problem because with the interaction problem we are (1) crossing ontological categories and (2) trying to explain how items with no common properties can interact. These two lines offer ways to break the symmetry and show how damning the interaction problem really is.

Belief in Qualia as Properly Basic (Version 1)

Belief in Qualia as Properly Basic (Version 1)

This post has since been updated with corrections and can be read here [https://ghostlightphilosophy.blogspot.com/2021/03/belief-in-qualia-as-properly-basic_20.html]

Introduction

Arguments from eliminative materialists try to claim that qualia do not exist because they cannot fit within a behaviouristic framework of mind. Attacks on qualia have grown in recent years as they have tried to be reduced to mechanical neurological interactions (Dennett, 1991 , Dennett, 1998) or reduced to feedback of emotions (Solms, 2021). Here, I want to articulate my view that belief in the real existence of qualia can be defended as properly basic. I will first outline what properly basic beliefs are and then defend my view that the existence of qualia can be defended as such. Finally I will respond to four anticipated objections to my argument.

1 – What are basic beliefs?

Basic beliefs are a key part of foundationalism in epistemology, as they form the very ‘foundation’ of the belief system that foundationalists hold. These are the very axioms of a belief system and do not depend upon justification of other beliefs but on something outside of the realm of belief. The justification for these is non-propositional. The agent does not need to have sufficient external justification for their basic belief because they operate at the very foundation of their belief system. It is perfectly rational to hold them without being based on other beliefs. Basic beliefs are usually broken into three categories…

1.       Ones which are directly evident to the senses.

2.       Ones that are incorrigible (necessarily true simply in virtue of being believed).

3.       Ones that are self-evident.

What follows is my checklist for whether a belief is basic and then we can compare the justification for qualia to this list…

·         Form the axioms of a belief system.

·         Do not depend upon external justification.

·         Self-evident

·         Directly evident to the senses

·         Incorrigible

2 – When do basic beliefs become properly basic?

A properly basic belief is simply a belief that is held on good epistemic warrant one which you are warranted to believe. That’s all really. Properly basic simply means that it is a justified basic belief, but again the justification does not come from any external source or relation to another propositional belief.

3 – What are qualia?

Qualia are often hard to define but easy to identify once experienced. There are many different definitions given in the literature. One is simply “phenomenal character”. Another is “properties of sense data”. A third is “intrinsic, non-representational properties”. And a fourth is “intrinsic, nonphysical, ineffable properties”. What all of these have in common is that they can characterise qualia as including…

·         Perceptual experiences (seeing red, hearing glass smash, tasting chilli, smelling farmyards and feeling a cactus thorn).

·         Bodily sensations (feeling an itch, feeling a muscle spasm, feeling a pain, feeling dizzy, etc…)

·         Felt reactions (feeling delight, lust, love, fear, etc…)

·         Felt moods (feeling elated, depressed, bored, jealous, calm, etc…)

In his 1998 essay ‘Quining Qualia’, Dennett says that for qualia to have any real existence, they must have the following four properties…

1.       Being ineffable (too great or extreme to be described in words).

2.       Being intrinsic (belonging naturally and directly to something or someone).

3.       Being private (only accessible from the 1^st person perspective).

4.       Being directly or immediately apprehensible in consciousness.

For example, the quale of experiencing the redness of an apple. It is too great to be described in words. I can write a whole book on how the redness feels to me but it will not capture in any sense how it felt to me. There is an extra dimension to their reality which cannot be articulated and understood by any reader. The redness of the apple as a quale would be intrinsic in the fact that it would only be accessible to the perceiver. I could not in principle access your quale of the redness because if I did it would become my quale and not yours anymore. The privateness of the redness also follows closely from this. The redness of the apple as a quale must also be directly or immediately apprehensible, meaning that I must be able to directly/immediately become aware of and understand my quale of the redness.

The definition of qualia which I think best encompasses the truth of their experience and the criteria outlined, is…

Qualia are introspectively or directly accessible, private, phenomenal aspects of our mental lives.

Running from Nagel’s “What is it like to be a bat?” essay, qualia also give us the knowledge of ‘what it feels like to…”.

Now I have given an overview of what qualia are and the definition of qualia I am sticking to [Qualia are introspectively or directly accessible, private, phenomenal aspects of our mental lives], I will now get on to defending my basic thesis that belief in qualia can be defended as properly basic, contrary to eliminative critiques of qualia from Dennett, Frankish and the Churchlands.

4 – Why belief in qualia is properly basic.

So can introspectively or directly accessible, private, phenomenal aspects of our mental lives (qualia) be justified as having real existence in a properly basic manner? I will argue that they can.

As I briefly articulated in my post titled “The Illusion of Time”, the proper way to begin to understanding consciousness is what I call the White Mind state. This is a state where we remove all inferences and models we use to make sense of things from our minds, and staying right in what are directly and immediately aware of. We need to remove all explanatory models which rely on inferences, such as materialism (since the idea of matter is an inference we use to make sense of sense experience). We should only keep the things which are so direct and immediate it is impossible to doubt their reality to our senses. Sense experience, qualia and consciousness are the only things left when you are in the White Mind state. Therefore, all there is on the White Mind state is experience and the knowing of experience. 

Where do qualia fit in to the WM (White Mind) state? Remember that qualia are “introspectively or directly accessible, private, phenomenal aspects of our mental lives.” When we are in the WM state, all we have is sense experience, qualia and consciousness. Is this not begging the question you may ask since I assume that qualia are part of the WM state? No it is not because we now only need to look at the definitions. In the WM state, are there introspectively or directly accessible, private, phenomenal aspects of our mental lives? Yes, that is entirely what composes us in the WM state – experience (phenomenal aspects of mental lives which are directly accessible and private) and the knowing of experience (introspection and the awareness of the experience espoused just before). So, when we get ourselves into the WM state by removing unnecessary inferences and models, the realty of qualia becomes self-evident. It is a lunatic’s game to deny the reality of qualia when the most basic aspect of our being is analysed.

But can this be defended in a properly basic way? I will now refer back to the checklist of what must be fulfilled for a belief to be properly basic…

·         Form the axioms of a belief system.

·         Do not depend upon external justification.

·         Self-evident

·         Directly evident to the senses

·         Incorrigible

In the WM state, are qualia espoused above the formation of the axioms of our belief system? Yes! This is because they constitute the most fundamental aspects of our consciousness – the most basic aspect of ourselves. All other models (such as materialism) are formed within consciousness. Any theory which accounts for consciousness must start with consciousness in order to explain it and in order to start with it you need to see what it is actually composed of. Both epistemically and ontologically, qualia are the literal basis of any theory of consciousness. Any theory which begins with matter and tries to reduce mind to matter is trying to reduce consciousness to an abstraction made within consciousness in order to explain itself. Any theory which violates the WM state will miss out crucial self-evident, directly and immediately accessible aspects of consciousness. Therefore any behaviourist account of consciousness will be, at the very least, incomplete.

Next, do qualia not depend upon external justification to believe in their existence? Yes! Matching the third and fourth points to this – qualia are self-evident upon a close reflection of consciousness and are directly evident to the senses of our consciousness. What is not more self-evident and directly evident to the senses than the raw feeling of redness or the raw feeling of pain? All the phenomenal aspects of our mental lives are self-evident to anyone with a mind and are directly evident to our senses.

But are they incorrigible? It would mean that they cannot be corrected or doubted, and are true simply in virtue of being believed. Now one objection – the illusions and hallucinations objection – could be levelled against this by arguing that we can be mistaken about the content of our experience and qualia, but (1) I will deal with this in section 5 and (2) it is not relevant anyway. Whether what we believe the content of the qualia to be is correspondent to reality or not, the fact that we are having qualia experience and a phenomenal aspect of our lives shows that the mere existence of qualia is incorrigible. One cannot experience qualia and yet rationally doubt their existence or try to correct the fact that they exist. So yes, the existence of qualia is incorrigible. This to me seems to satisfy all the necessary components for something to qualify as a properly basic belief. We have good first-hand epistemic warrant to believe in the reality of qualia. Therefore, belief in qualia is indeed properly basic.

5 – Responses to four anticipated objections.

No doubt my argument will have certain responses and objections. I wish to answer the main four I am anticipating in order to further defend my thesis.

5A – Qualia do not exist.

This will be the most popular objection I am anticipating to my thesis that belief in qualia can be properly basic. Eliminativists such as the Churchlands, Dennett and Frankish argue that consciousness is simply an illusion created by the brain. They all argue that qualia do not exist in any real sense. However all arguments against the existence of qualia are violations of the White Mind state. They have to rely on the unnecessary explanatory abstraction and inference of materialism and then argue that materialism is primary and that combinations of matter which produce brains go on to produce the illusion of consciousness. All of Dennett’s (1991, 1998) arguments against qualia explicitly assume the truth of the explanatory models of both materialism and behaviourism – both I heavily dispute. (I will be making a blog post critique of behaviourism in the future).

But why shouldn’t people violate the White Mind state? Is introspection and direct and immediate experience really enough to tell us about the true nature of consciousness? Yes. Introspection is the most privileged access we will ever have to the mystery of consciousness. Any behaviourist account is watered down and viewed solely from the 3^rd person perspective. How can this be more privileged to knowing the true nature and qualitative dimensions of consciousness which are so self-evident to all of us.

In short, any argument against the real existence of qualia is assuming either (1) materialism, (2) behaviourism or (3) both materialism and behaviourism. Doing either of the three is a violation of the White Mind state and is therefore an epistemically invalid criticism.

5B – There are no properly basic beliefs.

This objection mainly comes from anti-foundationalists such as coherentists. They claim that there are no foundational beliefs such as basic beliefs. One alternative view is to say that beliefs form some kind of “web” (Quine, 1970) although Quine held that logic and mathematics were at the center of the web, acting as the pseudo-foundation of the web of belief. However, I hold that even anti-foundationalism falls back into foundationalism in the following way. Anti-foundationalists believe that their ‘web of belief’ or system of coherent propositions is the grounds for their knowledge of whether a new proposition is true. This is, in my opinion, their properly basic belief. This axiom forms the foundation of their belief system, it does not depend upon external justification, and is self-evident from looking at their very system. Anti-foundationalists cannot doubt that a true proposition is one which coheres with other propositions. This is their properly basic belief. This objection will need to be considered in more detail though I think that the majority of philosophers hold some kind of properly basic belief (logical truths or mathematical axioms are the most popular choices). In the White Mind state, consciousness, qualia and sense experience would replace logic as the most properly basic beliefs, or under anti-foundationalism, they would be what is at the center of the new ‘web of belief’. In short, every epistemic worldview has some properly basic belief that almost serves as their dogma. There is no escaping this.

5C – Issues with illusions and hallucinations.

The issue of illusions and hallucinations can be put against this argument in the following way. Since we know that sometimes we have illusions and hallucinations with regards to the content of our sense experience (for example an oasis in a desert or a broken straw in a glass of water), we could therefore be equally deceived about the existence of qualia itself. However this objection holds little weight because even if we are being deceived about the contents of our qualia, it is undeniable that there are qualia. The White Mind state reveals this to us perfectly through direct and immediate ideas. The objection may seem stronger with hallucinations because with those we experience something that doesn’t actually exist in the real world. However this seems to be assuming some kind of indirect materialist style realism. Idealism on the other hand would say that sometimes inner experience and memories can impinge in an outwards direction onto your dissociative boundary and Markov blanket, and this impingement from the inside can recreate in low resolution a hallucinatory image. The image is in your mind as we would usually diagnose it to be but it is more real then in any indirect materialist style realism. In short, whilst the exact content of our qualia could be up for debate, there is no doubt that there are qualia and we experience them directly and immediately.

5D – The justification for qualia given here is not properly basic.

The final objection I am anticipating is that my justification given the White Mind state is not actually properly basic because you need to experience the qualia in order to know that they exist. The objector may say that belief in qualia depends on an external justification, mainly the very experience of them. However the objector here is misunderstanding what ‘external justification’ means. The term ‘external’ refers to another belief or proposition that you would use in order to justify belief in a new proposition. This occurs on either a foundationalist account or coherentist account of justification. When justifying our belief in qualia, we first start out with a belief in them because we experience them and then our justification for our belief doesn’t rely on another distinct external proposition. It relies on the self-evident, direct and immediate nature of qualia. We might be deceived about their specific contents (5C) but it is undeniable that qualia exist. The justification is entirely basic and leads to a properly basic belief in qualia.

6 – Conclusion

Here, I have presented by thesis that belief in qualia (introspectively or directly accessible, private, phenomenal aspects of our mental lives) can be justified as properly basic based on the White Mind state and the nature of properly basic beliefs. I have also considered four possible objections to my view and offered responses to them. Therefore I believe that belief in qualia can be properly basic, which serves as a defeater to any eliminativist or illusionist argument against their real existence.

The Argument from Consciousness – Response to Rationality Rules

The Argument from Consciousness – Response to Rationality Rules

Introduction

Rationality Rules is an atheist youtuber who often creates ‘debunking’ videos of popular apologetics arguments. In the video I will be reviewing (The Argument from Consciousness - Debunked (Consciousness Proves that god Exists - Refuted) - YouTube) and showing where RR makes a number of mistakes.

1 – Commentary

RR opens the video by saying…

“The phenomenon of consciousness is no doubt extraordinary. To be aware of and responsive to our surroundings is arguably the most mysterious and important aspect of our lives…but is it so extraordinary, so special, that it must be the product of divine intellect?”

The first big error here is how RR seems to be defining and classifying consciousness. Consciousness is much richer than the simple ability to be aware of and responsive to our environment. What makes the problem of human consciousness so hard to solve is (1) the wealth of neuroscientific evidence which calls in to question the assumption that the brain produces consciousness, and (2) the explanatory challenge of explaining how the brain produces qualitative sensations such as qualia. Both of these aspects have called into the question that all consciousness is is just an organism being responsive to their environment. Robots are aware of (in a diminished sense) and responsive to their environment but we do not say that they have consciousness.

At 0.56, RR then presents the argument in its syllogistic form which he presents as follows…

1.       It is a fact that human consciousness exists.

2.       This fact can be adequately explained within a theistic framework, whereas it cannot be adequately explained within a naturalistic (or materialistic) framework.

3.       Hence, there is a fact that only theism can explain.

4.       Therefore, God exists.

I have simply quoted this directly in order for the argument to be laid out in its syllogistic form and to avoid accusations of straw manning.

Next, at 1.33, RR defines consciousness as…

“the state of being aware of and responsive to one’s surroundings.”

However this is a totally inadequate definition of consciousness and is a definition that is never used by proponents of the argument from consciousness for God. RR seems to have gotten the definition from, you guessed it, Google. As mentioned before, human consciousness is much more complex than this simplistic and exclusive definition. Nobody in neuroscience and philosophy of mind has been able to come up with a fixed, all-encompassing definition of consciousness, so if RR seems to think that he has ‘the’ definition then I suggest he publishes a paper and goes and gets his Nobel prize. The faculties of human consciousness such as introspection and qualia are much harder to make sense of under materialism, but have been conveniently omitted from RR’s definition.

At 1.47, RR then goes on to accusing theists of defining consciousness as something that it isn’t…

“many proponents of the argument from consciousness attempt to implicitly define it to mean something that it’s not. Such as ‘a transcendent part of the human personality’, and in doing this they’re attempting to immaterial and unnatural properties into the definition of consciousness, which is essentially a backhand way of Begging the Question.”

After an extensive research, I could find no philosophical paper or entry in anywhere on the internet in which a proponent of this argument defined consciousness as “a transcendent part of the human personality”. I have no clue where RR got this theistic definition from but no theist or non-physicalist I have ever read, come across or seen through research has ever defined consciousness this way. As such, his accusation of begging the question holds no water because he is attacking straw-man theism. What makes it even worse is that RR has also defined consciousness as something which it isn’t, in order to make it easier to explain under naturalism/materialism. Talk about begging the question.

Then at 2.09, RR says the following…

“they [theists] must first acknowledge that every shred of evidence has so far supported the statement that consciousness is a product of the mind, which in turn is a product of the brain – there’s absolutely no evidence to suggest that our consciousness is independent of our bodies…none.”

First point I want to address that despite his confident tone, RR gave no evidence whatsoever in either his video or his video description to support this statement. He didn’t even give any neuroscientific papers a mention. Maybe RR should watch this video by Inspiring Philosophy just to whet his appetite (Neuroscientific Evidence: Irreducible Mind (Part 1) - YouTube) and then purchase these books : Irreducible Mind (2009), Beyond Physicalism (2019) and Consciousness Unbound (2021). RR’s proposition here also seems to conflict with his earlier definition of consciousness. Before he said that consciousness is simply the ability to be aware of and responsive to one’s surroundings, but now he says that consciousness is a product of the mind. You could have a brain which helps an organism respond to its environment and be aware of it without any mental states, qualia, introspection and intentionality at all. If consciousness is produced by the mind then why do we have a mind?

The next criticism of RR’s idea here is that just because there is no evidence of consciousness outside of an appeared body, it does not follow that it is product of the brain. RR has himself committed the non-sequitur fallacy. In my idealistic framework, the brain and the body are the extrinsic appearances of conscious and unconscious mental processes. This hypothesis is entirely suitable with his claim that there is evidence of consciousness being independent from our bodies. Even this claim however can be called into question with cumulative research into near death experiences. Check out another video (Near Death Experiences: Irreducible Mind (Part 5) - YouTube). I would recommend that RR looks into the near death experience of Pam Reynolds as well.

The actual criticism of the argument begins at 2.34 where RR says…

“the first objection to be stated is that premise three [Hence, there is a fact that only theism can explain] doesn’t follow from premise two, making the entire argument a non-sequitur. Even if we were to assume that theism can adequately explain consciousness, and that naturalism can’t, it by no means follows from this alone that only theism can explain consciousness.”

This criticism I completely agree with but it is more targeted at the formal structure in which the very specific presentation of the argument has been presented. Yes, there are several non-theistic alternatives that can explain consciousness. The argument should have been formatted in more Bayesian terms to say something to the effect of : ‘non-naturalistic hypothesis can offer better explanations of consciousness therefore we should favour non-naturalistic theories over naturalistic ones’. However, both of the alternatives that RR brings up, deism and pantheism, are both subsets of theism so they are not actually non-theistic alternatives. They should have been phrased as ‘non-Abrahamic theistic alternatives’ because this seems to be what his point is. Other possible options to mention are panpsychism, dual-aspect idealism, analytic idealism, absolute idealism, etc…

RR then goes on to say that the argument commits a black and white fallacy, which it does and I wholly agree with his criticism there also.

Next, at 3.44, RR raises another critique…

“A third flaw to raise is that even if the conclusion of the argument was valid, all it would prove is that theism alone can explain consciousness…it wouldn’t even suggest, let alone prove that a specific religion is true.”

However, the argument was never set out to do this. The subtitle of RR’s video is “Consciousness Proves that god Exists – Refuted). The argument from consciousness never set out to prove that a specific deity exists or that a specific religion is true. This criticism is completely irrelevant to the point here.

At 4.12, RR levels another criticism of the argument, and here is where the major disagreements will come in…

“A fourth spectacular flaw that the Argument from Consciousness commits is a giant argument from ignorance. If we cut to the core of what’s being asserted, it’s essentially that because we can’t explain consciousness from a naturalistic framework (which by the way we can), theism must be correct. Or put more directly, the argument from consciousness is founded on the statement that ‘we don’t know how to explain consciousness, therefore God.’”

This is a common talking point from materialists and atheists, that the explanation has to be natural or it’s an argument from ignorance because everything we have discovered is natural so based off induction we should infer natural. Firstly, this argument can be reversed into a much stronger argument for idealism by saying that everything we experienced and been aware of is ultimately qualia, sense experience and consciousness therefore we should infer that everything is qualia, sense experience and consciousness. Secondly, proponents of the argument aren’t just waving their hands and shouting that naturalism cannot explain consciousness at the moment, they are arguing that the very metaphysics of materialism and naturalism, cannot even in principle begin to tackle the hard problem of consciousness or the quantitative/qualitative distinction. It’s much more than just the muddled, confused cry of theists. Maybe read these books to understand the depth of the problem…

·         Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonus (Berkeley, 1713)

·         The Conscious Mind (Chalmers, 1996)

·         The Mysterious Flame (McGinn, 1999)

·         Why Materialism is Baloney (Kastrup, 2014)

·         The Idea of the World (Kastrup, 2018)

The “we don’t know therefore God” objection is explicitly assuming naturalism and materialism in this argument and RR needs to hold his burden of proof to defend these metaphysical presuppositions. His argument is basically “it has to have a natural explanation or it’s an argument from ignorance”.

At 4.00, RR goes on to give his explanation of how naturalism can explain consciousness by saying…

“To state it very, very simply, the nervous system evolved to orchestrate movement, feelings evolved to move organisms towards or away from stimulus, awareness evolved to make sense of these feelings, and consciousness evolved to allow organisms to respond more efficiently to their feelings.”

However, this is far from any explanation of consciousness and how the brain is responsible for producing qualia and introspective abilities and meta-cognition. Simply slapping evolution onto consciousness doesn’t suddenly explain it away. It didn’t work for Dennett and it certainly won’t work for you. RR says that the “nervous system evolved to orchestrate movement” which is partly true but you also need a muscular system, respiratory system, cardiovascular system and a skeletal system in order to move along with a nervous system (in humans anyway).

RR then says that “feelings evolved to move organisms towards or away from stimulus”. This is simply false. A stimulus response is needed but none of this necessitates the inner qualia associated with a feeling/response to stimulus. Chalmers brings this point up by saying that all of evolution could work equally well “in the dark”. We still don’t have an explanation for why it doesn’t work in the dark. Robots can move towards or away from a stimulus but it does not follow that they have feelings. RR seems to have watched this one 18 minute video to get this information (Why evolution invented consciousness (and how to make the most of it): Bjorn Grinde at TEDxLSE 2014 - YouTube). The person leading the talk is Bjorn Grinde – a biologist. He is not a philosopher of mind, nor is he a neuroscientist or cognitive scientist. I don’t think RR picked his source well for this video. I plan to create a blog post responding to Grinde’s hypothesis at a later date.

RR then says, “awareness evolved to make sense of these feelings”. Again, since there is no reason why these ‘feelings’ or stimuli responses can not work as effectively in the dark, as Chalmers would put it, not explaining feelings leads us into this non-answer. It has no explanatory power because until it can be substantiated that the brain produces the qualities of feelings from stimuli then the idea of awareness is irrelevant. He has built his hypothesis on a sand-castle and the tide is coming in.

Finally, simply saying that it ‘evolved’ also has no explanatory power. How did it evolve? How did brain structures change over time to create the emergence of qualitative experience from brain tissue and environmental stimuli? When did humans become conscious or is consciousness a graduated scale? RR seems to think that name dropping evolution by natural selection does all the explaining but it doesn’t. If he seriously thinks that this is a solution to the problem of consciousness then he, like Dennett, is living in magic fairy tale land.

There are many organisms which do not have consciousness but are incredibly adept at survival. The tardigrade is a microscopic organism but it is extremophilic. It can survive in a wide variety of temperature and pressure conditions and can respond to its environment appropriately. It is extremely good at surviving. However it does not have anything like human consciousness or cognition. I would hope that we can both agree that tardigrades do not have meta-cognition or emotions like we do. If RR's hypothesis is correct, then we should expect to see only organisms with our level of consciousness or something comparable to it being the best at surviving and reproducing. However this is not what we see.

This is the end of my commentary because the rest of the video is just a recap and him thanking his subscribers for subscribing.

2 – Conclusion

RR’s video on the argument from consciousness is to me an extremely poor quality video. The first reason for this is that he presented an extremely bad version of the argument. I agree with his analysis of a few fallacies within the argument since the argument he presented is deductively invalid. The second reason for me thinking the video is poor quality is because of his complete ignorance of the complexity of the problem of consciousness and its surrounding microproblems. If RR thinks that his 40 second rundown of evolution solves the problem of consciousness, then he has a lot more to learn. In short, whilst informative in parts, this video needs serious revision to be considered any “debunking” of the argument from consciousness.

 

 

 

 

 

Commentary on the TJump/Julien Musolino Discussion on Idealism and Consciousness

Commentary on the TJump/Julien Musolino Discussion on Idealism and Consciousness

Introduction

The aim of this post is to simply provide commentary on a recent discussion that YouTube atheist TJump had with psychologist and cognitive scientist Julien Musolino (link here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAl_f9jddHY&t=37s) relating to the soul, consciousness, idealism and panpsychism. The reason for this post is to correct numerous errors that both TJump and Julien had regarding the doctrine of idealism and how consciousness works.

1 – Commentary

The real meat of the discussion begins at 5.03 where TJump makes the claim that…

“they [idealists] present a very confident case that we should all believe that the soul is fundamental to all of reality and that it is not just a product of the brain.”

However TJump seems to be poisoning the well from the get-go here. No idealist has ever claimed that “the soul is fundamental to all of reality”. You will never see the word soul used synonymously with mind at large or universal consciousness anywhere in the works of Berkeley, Bradley, McTaggart, Fitche, Hegel, Kant, Goff or Kastrup. Using the word soul has radically different connotations to the term consciousness. The soul is often associated with the school of substance dualism which is radically different to idealism. This may not have been intentional but it seems that TJump has either (1) straw manned the position of idealism to make it easier to attack or (2) doesn’t understand what idealism actually says. I will side with the latter interpretation for now.

The next point to discuss is at 5.33 where Julien says…

“idealism…is notoriously unfalsifiable so it’s hard to actually – at least given our current state of knowledge.”

The idea trailed off into talking about science which I will talk about later but the central idea here is the idealism is unfalsifiable. However this criticism, whilst popular, has little weight because idealism is a school of ontology, much like materialism. You cannot do a certain science experiment and show it to be false. This is not an issue, despite how Julien tried to make it to be one, because you also cannot falsify materialism. This is because they are ontologies. Science is purely concerned with how reality behaves; not what reality is. Reality would behave in the same way whether materialism or idealism is true. They are empirically equivalent so science cannot be used to determine which school is the best choice. In addition, materialism suffers from exactly the same problem. No matter how many years we sit scratching our heads no closer to solving the hard problem of consciousness, materialists always have their ‘Get out of jail free’ card where they can say “Just give us more time and one day we will crack it, we will solve the problem one day”. The time can just keep getting pushed back and blaming the lack of progress on our limited knowledge. His criticism has little weight because (1) it is an irrelevant criticism in the first place and (2) it can be equally reversed onto materialism, meaning we need a symmetry breaker outside of science to determine which school we should choose.

At 5.54, Julien begins to talk about the relationship between consciousness and science by stating that…

“and from that perspective and the extraordinary power that it [materialist science] has had over several hundred years now, I conclude that the kind of soul that most people believe in, sometimes it is called popular dualism in the philosophical literature, is extremely unlikely to exist.”

There are two ideas mangled together here and I will discuss each in turn. The first is something to the effect of the argument from past scientific success in favour of materialism. The argument goes similar to what Julien said by saying that when we assume materialism and use the scientific method, we seem to get the correct results about how reality works, and our past supernatural explanations are replaced with demonstratable natural ones. It shows that materialism is failing when a weak inductive argument is the best that they can come up with. The argument fails for the same reason that I explained before – no amount of scientific evidence can be used to confirm or falsify an ontology. Science when done properly is what is called ‘ontology invariant’ – it doesn’t care about whether materialism or idealism is true, it simply tells us how nature behaves. No amount of novel, future, testable predictions (TJump’s favourite phrase) can be used to make conclusions of a non-scientific nature. It’s almost a very autistic style response to simply say that because we have used one pragmatic system in the past that got us results that we therefore cannot change the system when the time to outgrow it comes.

The second idea Julien brings up is to do with popular dualism. However, this has no bearing on idealism and I actually agree that the popular theological conception of the soul that Julien alludes to, the one of an immaterial soul inhabiting a material body, is highly unlikely to exist based off the metaphysical issues with the interaction problem. Popular (substance) dualism is also not compatible with various pieces of neuroscientific data we have. The reason that Julien seems to talk about popular dualism here rather than idealism – as TJump directed the original question to be – is because TJump himself poisoned the question by using the term ‘soul’ – described before. Idealists shy away from using the term exactly for this reason. It has broad theological and dualistic connotations that distract from the real conversation at hand.

Next, at 6.31, Julien continues by saying…

“before you throw out the entire scientific edifice, you have to do a bit more thinking and you have to show that your positions can yield some understanding.”

However this criticism is tainted with the same flawed understanding of the relationship between idealism and science. He seems to think that if everyone adopted idealism, the entire scientific understanding of the world would be demolished and would have to be built up again from square one. However this is false. We would still be able to model falling balls using SUVAT equations, we would still be able to measure the effects of the Higgs boson, we would just have a different understanding of what a ball and a Higgs boson are as ontological items.

It is also quite arrogant to say that idealistic thinkers have not done enough thinking. Berkeley, Bradley, McTaggart, Fitche, Hegel, Kant, Goff or Kastrup have surely done lots of thinking about how to understand the nature of reality. Maybe read some of their works to get a flavour for where their ideas come from. These thinkers yield great understanding of the nature of reality, the nature of time, the origins of consciousness and how consciousness works and manifests. Julien seems to be unaware of any of the key idealistic thinkers apart from Kastrup (and I will admit Kastrup’s delivery of ideas does need some improvement).

Julien continues at 6.46 by saying…

“at the heart I think, of their position is the problem of consciousness, the so called hard problem [of consciousness] which is, you know, a difficult problem. But there are a number of possible positions on that problem so…”

Here, Julien is articulating why he believe many people jump ship from materialism and move to ideas such as dualism, panpsychism and idealism – confronting the hard problem of consciousness. The hard problem is undoubtedly a hard problem and has boggled the minds of philosophers and neuroscientists for decades since its formal christening. However, it is more than a “difficult problem” as Julien articulates it to be. It is a really difficult problem with no solution on the horizon or any steps made towards a solution without resolving to denying many relevant and undeniable aspects of consciousness (qualia are denied any real existence by Dennett, Churchland and Frankish). I agree that the hard problem is one of the main motivations for adopting alternative theories, but it is not at the heart of many idealists’ case. The hard problem wasn’t even articulated until 1995 by Chalmers so many of the German and British idealists clearly had other motivations. Their motivations, like mine, are also epistemic and ontological. Consciousness is the only reality we are sure of and cannot deny. Rather than creating an abstract model of matter to explain everything, we could simply expand what we do know – consciousness – out to everything. No ontological bridges are made and all the data can be made sense of without burning science to the ground. Again, Julien seems unaware of the numerous key German and British idealistic thinkers who articulated their positions similar to this.

You will probably see a repeating pattern here because at 7.44, Julien makes a similar point by saying the following…

“it’s too soon for people like Goff and company to say, ‘well let’s throw out science and try something else.’”

The same tired idea is being repeated here again – that idealism undermines science. No, science should be ontology invariant, the fact that materialism has become so tied to modern science is a philosophical inference (a bad one) not a scientific fact. Julien also seems to strawman what panpsychists like Goff and other idealists say. They have never claimed that we should “throw out science and try something else”. They have only ever claimed that materialistic science seems totally unequipped to deal with the hard problem of consciousness and its associated microproblems. Goff has actually articulated that a panpsychist metaphysics couped with neuroscience will give us a much better understanding of how consciousness arises. Julien seems to either (1) misunderstand the claims of Goff and company, (2) misunderstand the relationship between materialism and science or (3) be setting up deliberate strawmen of his opponent’s positions.

At around 8.20-8.40, Julien also exposes the distinction between primary and secondary qualities of an object and says that using our understanding of this distinction (that primary qualities are objective and in the object and secondary qualities are subjective and only in the perceiver) science has progressed pretty far. However this is just another iteration of the argument from past scientific success already dealt with before.

At 8.39, Julien also says the following…

“but now, it’s [materialism] bumping against – so it’s explained all kinds of stuff – but now bumping against the problem, the so called hard problem.”

My point exactly. Materialism is not equipped to even deal with the very phenomenon which created it. Materialism is an abstraction created within consciousness yet materialism cannot explain the very consciousness which birthed it. This is why I find dogmatic materialists so frustrating because they fail to see that materialism is not a fact; there is no empirical evidence for materialism (all evidence is sense experience and qualia). It is a philosophical abstraction which has cut its own roots off by failing to account for the primary datum of experience and existence – consciousness.

Then at 8.54, Julien articulates an issue which many scientists have with idealism and panpsychism which I can be sympathetic to. He says…

“…or do we need some radical new approach? So do we need to now do what these people [Goff, Kastrup] are saying?”

The biggest block that many scientists have towards idealism is that it seems “radical” because it denies the very foundation which has been dogmatically enshrined within its doctrine – the doctrine of matter. When idealists blow this out, it can create such an immediate knee-jerk reaction that many dismiss idealism off hand. However, using the White Mind state and introspection (see my post titled The Illusion of Time), we can see that all that is is experience and the knowing/attention of experience. Everything else is an inference. Far from radical, idealism brings people back down to earth and away from radical abstractions and self-defeating inferences.

I’ll give Julien bashing a break for a minute and actually agree with what he says below at 9.29…

“but I think it’s very interesting, I think people should pursue all kinds of avenues, that’s what makes science so interesting and you don’t know ahead of time where breakthroughs and discoveries are going to come from.”

I wish more scientists has this more open ended attitude to the question of consciousness because it is the most baffling unsolved puzzle ever, more puzzling than string theory and Higgs bosons and quantum gravity combined.

Back to TJump now and at 9.47, he makes a rather long monologue about his confusion surrounding idealistic and panpsychist arguments…

“When I hear the arguments I’m very confused by them, like I don’t understand why they think these are really compelling arguments because if we take the idea that if we just make consciousness a fundamental thing and say that it’s a part of the universe – its all just electrons are made of consciousness or whatever – how is this different from saying consciousness is a composite thing what we just haven’t discovered yet, like what problem does it solve to make it a fundamental thing rather than just saying it’s a composite thing?”

Many people think that idealism and panpsychism are silly and confusing because it forces them to doubt their most fundamental presupposition, that matter exists. Their entire worldview is based on this presupposition, so the psychological roadblocks go up immediately. However I don’t want to unfairly represent TJump’s confusion so I will address his contention below.

His main counter was to say that positing consciousness as a fundamental aspect of reality does no more explaining or problem solving than simply saying that it is a “composite” thing (I assume he means a product of the brain here) that we simply haven’t discovered yet. However, with TJump’s theory that it is created by the brain, we need to say 2 things. (1) There is no evidence that the brain produces consciousness. All we have are correlates of consciousness. This is not evidence that the brain produces consciousness because I can use the same datum to point in a completely different direction (mainly that they are images of our underlying conscious processes, when viewed in the 3^rd person). (2) Appeals to unknowns automatically make you lose all of your hypothesis’ explanatory power. It terminates any further explanation until the evidence magically becomes available. And materialists can simply sit and repeat that old phrase of ‘give us more time and one day we will get there, one day we will solve it’. It’s an all too convenient escape hatch. However, when we say that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of reality, we are not just ad-hoc putting it as such to remove a problem, we are analysing our epistemic grounds for materialism. Idealists often go right to the root of how the problem arises (the hard problem arises due to matter being defined as non-conscious and non-experiential in nature) and see if we can formulate reality in a better way so that the problem does not arise. The only argument which counters what I have said here would be the argument from past scientific success for materialism, but I have dealt with this at length in previous paragraphs.

Finally, this argument can be reversed as an argument against materialism. Take the question of “Why is there something rather than nothing?”. In this we want to explain why matter exists. So what do materialists do? Posit matter as a fundamental aspect of reality. For example, many posit some sort of quantum foam as a fundamental layer of reality in order to explain the existence of everything else we see. Why should materialists be allowed to posit the thing they are trying to explain the existence of (matter) as fundamental but the idealist or the panpsychist cannot with consciousness?

If TJump is to prefer the hypothesis that consciousness is an unknown thing produced by the brain in a way we haven’t discovered yet then he needs to show how his hypothesis is (1) better supported by the data we have, (2) has more explanatory power and (3) requires less assumptions, presuppositions and inferences to idealistic and panpsychist alternatives.

Beginning at 11.42, Julien offers a well deserved steelman of the non-materialist position against the brain producing consciousness by saying…

“the problem seems to be that if you have a computational system that, you know, behaves intelligently, why should it have a first person perspective? It doesn’t follow from anything in the computational theory of mind. So it’s completely mysterious, that it brings up notions like so-called philosophical zombies.”

This steelman was well deserved in a conversation where both participants seemed relatively unaware of what the doctrines they were attacking were actually saying.

Jumping to 14.19, TJump once again reiterates his point about the explanatory symmetry between a panpsychist approach and a materialist approach by saying…

“Well do you think that the proposed solution of taking these polyps of consciousness and saying that they exist fundamentally and somehow produce the brain but we don’t know how – is that any different from saying…that it’s material and the combinations of material stuff produce this?”

I have already addressed this criticism so I will not add anything more to the commentary here.

Skipping ahead to 18.39, Julien offers another critique of the fundamental consciousness hypothesis by saying…

“What you don’t want to do for explanatory purposes is take the whole thing, so take my entire personal, mental life and say, ‘that’s fundamental’ because they you beg the question – you postulate the very thing you’re trying to explain.”

I have two responses to this objection. The first is the same as what I said before, that this argument can easily be reversed against the materialist when they try to explain where matter came from. If the argument were sound, then the materialist could not postulate a fundamental material item in order to explain the existence of matter. My second objection is that idealism never takes our “personal, mental life” and says that it alone is fundamental. Julien is confusing idealism with solipsism, although no solipsist has ever said that their personal mind is fundamental, they just say that their personal mind is all that exists. Idealism says that nature and reality is fundamentally mental/conscious in nature. It never said that all of reality is restricted to my personal mind. Finally, the fundamental consciousness hypothesis is not begging the question. Begging the question is a fallacy where the proponent creates an argument where the premises assume the truth of the conclusion. With idealism, the conclusion is that reality is fundamentally mental/conscious in nature or ontology. However, no idealistic argument ever assumes that reality is fundamentally as such and then argues from this to the same conclusion it assumed. You will find this nowhere in the work of Berkeley, Bradley, McTaggart, Fitche, Hegel, Schelling, Kant, or Kastrup. Julien’s idea of begging the question as simply postulating the existence of the very thing you are trying to explain as a fundamental aspect of reality is definitely not an example of begging the question.

At 20.52, Julien makes an interesting concession which is as follows…

“The question is what can we explain, and the answer so far for consciousness is nothing. We can’t explain a damn thing because we don’t have a clue how it works. So that leads us to propose all kinds of things.”

And this is entirely accurate. Nobody has a clue how the brain produces consciousness yet we are told dogmatically that it does. We have no idea how the brain encodes and decodes memories yet we are dogmatically told that it does. As stated before, there is no evidence that the brain produces consciousness. We have correlations through the neuro-correlates of consciousness but that is it. All evidence the materialist or physicalist will propose can be shown to actually not be evidence of their hypothesis. This is because if I can use the same evidence to point in an entirely different direction (to idealism) then it is not actually evidence of materialism and the brain producing consciousness. It is like a broken compass that originally points North but then when shaken it points South West.

However, after making this admission, Julien goes on to reiterate the argument from past scientific success for materialism which has been addressed before.

The next interesting section to dissect began at 23.28 which is copied below where the two discuss the possibility/impossibility of bridging the hard problem or quantitative/qualitative distinction.

TJump : “The panpsychists and idealists come back and say, ‘No that’s impossible, it’s completely impossible that [brains producing consciousness] could happen because no description could ever give you the sensation of redness, you can’t describe redness with any kind of descriptive terms in physics, it’s impossible!’”

Julien : “Yeah, but that’s, I mean you got to be careful about these arguments, you can’t conclude from our ignorance that something’s impossible, we don’t know. It could be impossible yes.”

This is interesting. TJump actually does a good job of steelmanning the idealist position and articulating the quantitative/qualitative distinction. Julien’s response leaves a lot to be desired.

My first objection would be via the null hypothesis. The null hypothesis is to always “Rephrase that question in a form that assumes no relationship between the variables. In other words, assume a treatment has no effect.” (Google definition). The question here being, does brain activity produce sensory qualities are qualia? Here, we need to assume that there is no relationship between the variables until we have sufficient evidence to indicate otherwise. So, we assume that there is no relationship, especially causally, between sensory qualities and brain activity until we have sufficient evidence to indicate otherwise. And in this case there is no evidence, never mind sufficient evidence (outlined in previous paragraphs). So, sticking with the null hypothesis, we conclude that brain activity does not produce sensory qualities and qualia until sufficient evidence comes up to indicate otherwise. It’s not about it being impossible, it’s about needing sufficient evidence in order to reject the null hypothesis that the brain does not produce sensory qualities and qualia.

My second objection would be that in order to say that something is impossible, we usually rely on conceptual analysis all the time. For example, we say that married bachelors are impossible because it is a contradiction by definition. We do a conceptual analysis of the terms and show that a married bachelor cannot even be conceived. Square circles are deemed impossible by this same standard, we could not even conceive of a square circle. Same with this, we cannot even conceive, in principle or metaphysically, how we can go from pure quantities of matter to the qualitative realm of qualia and sense experience. Materialists don’t even have metaphysics on their side. Julien might object and say that we simply have not got access to the relevant knowledge of how to bridge the gap so we just have to say that we don’t know and confess our ignorance. However, if he is to take this line of reasoning, then he would have to say that square circles and married bachelors are infact possible and maybe we just don’t have all the relevant knowledge. We cannot conclude from our ignorance that they are impossible can we?

My final objection is a modal one. Julien says at the end that it could indeed be an impossible gap to cross. But if this is so, then there is at least one possible world (modal logic here) where brains identical in anatomy and structure to ours cannot produce qualia and sensory qualities. If that situation occurs but there is another world (possibly ours) where brains identical in anatomy and structure do produce qualia and sensory qualities, then there must be a relevant difference between the two worlds which makes it such that qualia and sensory qualities are only produced in one world but not the other. But since these brains are identical in both possible worlds there can be no relevant difference. Therefore, Julien is faced with two options (1) accept that the gap really is impossible to cross or (2) show the exact relevant difference between the brains which makes it so that one produces qualia and the other does not. Since (2) is not an option based on the scenario he set up, he has to fall into (1). Brains of our anatomy either produce qualia in all possible worlds or no possible worlds. It is either true or impossible. I say impossible based off the reasons given before and the null hypothesis.

TJump and Julien loop around again to talking about the relationship between idealism and science in this exchange beginning at 25.48…

TJump : “Do you think that the arguments alone are going to be sufficient for that [belief in non-materialism] or are they [non-materialists] going to need some testable predictions?”

Julien : “Oh they’re going to need much more than the arguments; I mean the arguments are interesting and they may be a good start to start looking somewhere but…I mean think about the asymmetry. If you want to flip modern science upside down, okay, you can do that but I mean think about the strength of the prior on modern science and materialism and physicalism, it’s just astronomical.”

TJump’s leading question and Julien’s response here again show how the two conflate the relationship between ontological questions and scientific enquiry. First, I want to respond directly to TJump’s challenge of “testable predictions”. Idealism and materialism are empirically equivalent theories, meaning they can both make sense of the data of reality. This also means that they can form the same predictions about how reality will behave (all science is concerned about). There is nothing stopping either one making any prediction. Therefore, no testable prediction could be used to confirm idealism or materialism. You cannot use empirical evidence to justify metaphysical claims. When talking about the ontology of nature, we need to do conceptual analysis, ontological examination, and compare which has the most theoretical virtues such as simplicity, lack of inferences, explanatory power, explanatory scope, etc…

Julien’s response is very similar to his other responses where he ties in materialism with science and says that questioning materialism would lead to science being diminished being flipped “upside down”. Our understanding of what reality is would be flipped upside down, but science would remain relatively unscathed. We would still know that medicines work by inducing certain chemical reactions. We would just have a different understanding of what a chemical reaction is. I agree that modern idealism’s biggest problem is that it is still in its infancy. This is because materialism has had millennia to flourish and develop its understanding. Imagine if everyone became an idealist for one year. All doctors, all physicists, all technicians, all engineers, all philosophers. Imagine how much our understanding of reality would change if all our minds worked together. The asymmetry is simply due to the fact that so few people have been idealists and that materialism has rather foolishly been tied inseparably to science since the early 1900s.

The next point to address is that just after this response, TJump brought up the idea of empirical equivalence and when responding to the idea that both materialism and idealism are empirically equivalent, Julien said at 27.38…

“No. I don’t think they are. I don’t think they are. If they did [were] then most scientists would be idealists but they’re not.”

What’s strange about this reply is that Julien gives no piece of empirical evidence from neuroscience, psychology, cognitive science, physics, chemistry, biology or anywhere in order to back up his point. He just asserts that they are not empirically equivalent without any proper justification. His actual reason for believing that they aren’t is silly at best. The fact that most scientists are materialists is rather a symptom of cultural programming than deep ontological analysis. He admits just a few seconds later that most scientists never think about these deep ontological questions, showing further that most scientists are materialists simply because that is how the culture rolls in the 21^st century. Not a good response at all from Julien.

His next point that I want to respond to is from 29.06 where Julien again shows that he doesn’t seem to understand the doctrine of idealism or panpsychism too well…

“We take it for granted, intuitively at least, which may or may not be correct, that there is a world out there that’s independent of our mental experience. Could that be wrong, yes of course.”

Again, the issue with this response is that idealism, nor panpsychism has ever claimed that there is no world outside of our mental experience. Julien seems to be confusing idealism with solipsism. Just because there is a world which is outside of our personal mental experience, does not mean that there is a world outside mental experience or consciousness itself.

Next, at 32.34, is a long section where Julien articulates a point I agree with massively but ends up shooting himself in the foot in the process of uttering it. See below…

TJump : “You did mention that you don’t think that both of the hypothesis of materialism and idealism/panpsychism explain reality equivalently, so what would be a good example to bring up that could show something that the materialist worldview explains better…for in my conversations with idealists. What would be a good way to explain that?”

Julien : “I guess we have to distinguish here between physical theories and metaphysical theories. Everything could be true of science even in a  - so let’s suppose that we live in the matrix, well within the matrix there are still rules. So what you can say what science is is trying to understand the rules of the matrix, even though we know that the whole thing is a matrix whilst science would still be very very useful within the matrix because it would explain the rules of the matrix. So scientists are usually trying to be neutral about metaphysics because these are often questions that we can’t really answer.”

The best part of this non-answer is that I almost agree with Julien’s assessment of science here. The only part of it I disagree with is when he says that “scientists are usually trying to be neutral about metaphysics”. This is flatly false. Modern science is dripping in materialism. The mere idea of idealism sends modern scientists into crisis mode. Scientists today don’t even understand the metaphysical shackles they are chained to. This response also seems to completely show why TJump’s question has no answer. There is no piece of data that materialism can explain that idealism cannot explain. However there is one giant piece of data that idealism can explain but materialism has no explanation for – consciousness.

At 34.17, Julien also says the following…

“People could say ‘Look yes I am an idealist and I believe in all the methodologies you believe in but I think that the world is really a figment of our imagination, and that explains things better.”

Yet again, Julien is showing that he does not understand what idealism is saying. Idealism does not say and has never said that the world is just a figment of our imagination. Nowhere in any idealistic philosopher’s works will you find this idea. The closest anyone got to this was Berkeley and even he didn’t go this far into the depths of solipsism. This is probably getting repetitive but I want to highlight that I don’t think that TJump or Julien fully grasp the doctrines of idealism and other non-materialistic ontologies.

Then, at 34.49, Julien repeats his assertion of unfalsifiability by saying…

“Idealism is simply, currently is unfalsifiable, so, you know, does it explain things better, no, I mean there is nothing in it that says, ‘Look if you make those metaphysical assumptions, then you can explain things that if you don’t make those metaphysical assumptions you couldn’t explain.”

The claim of unfalsifiability plagues all metaphysical ontologies. After just articulating that science is not a good tool for accessing metaphysical and ontological questions, Julien then says that idealism is not a good theory because it cannot be falsified (meaning in the scientific sense of the word).  For the last time, no empirical evidence can be used to confirm of falsify an ontology. End of.

There was only 10 minutes of the discussion left where the two discussed idealism and consciousness and they then went on to talk about ethics and free will. The rest of the discussion on idealism and consciousness was running over the same territory I have already responded to here so I will end this section here.

2 – Conclusion

To conclude this longer style blog post, both TJump and Julien Musolino made some fundamental errors when critiquing and discussing idealism and consciousness. Note that the original title of the livestream was “Why idealism and panpsychism are silly” but TJump changed it to “The soul, idealism and panpsychism” a few days later. Idealism is far from silly, but an ever emerging threat to the materialist paradigm that deserves to be taken more seriously.