Thank you for sharing this, Gregg.  I just hosted a debate on The Integral
Stage re: emergentism vs panpsychism (on the place of consciousness in the
cosmos).  I posted my own reflections on the debate this morning, which I'm
sharing here for anyone interested:

I've been wanting to do a response to David and Matt's recent
dialogue/debate.  Overall I enjoyed it quite a lot, but also was a little
frustrated, since I felt that on a number of points, there was a paradigm
disjunction and not enough traction was made.  So it ended up feeling
incomplete to me (and I do hope there is eventually a Round 2).

Rather than go over the debate point by point, however, I'd like to offer
my own thoughts on panpsychism, which is my current paradigm of choice.  I
really would prefer a different word than panpsychism, but it is hard to
find good (and as easily recognizable) alternatives.  In any event, this is
not a formal, researched statement, which I may do at some point later.
This is my off-the-cuff riffing on my general thought on this topic.

Whether consciousness emerges at some point in evolution, or is pervasive
throughout all matter/energy, would not make a significant difference to my
spirituality.  The fact that consciousness emerged at the level of
bacteria, or higher organisms, would not impact what I mostly value and get
out of spiritual practice.

I make this point first, to dispense with the argument that any defense of
panpsychism must be primarily theological (rather than philosophical or
scientific).

From a postmetaphysical perspective, and from a perspective of epistemic
humility, I think at this point in our understanding we need to entertain
metaphysical and theoretical pluralism -- allowing for multiple possible
interpretations, though of course not a mere relativism.  Some options will
be stronger than others.  But we have to grapple with the uncomfortable
fact (for some!) that identical empirical observations can be accommodated
by multiple interpretations, without easy resolution.

And from a postmetaphysical perspective, while we recognize that some
grounding in metaphysics is unavoidable, we want to generally prefer
metaphysical assumptions which are parsimonious, logically consistent,
powerfully explanatory, and/or open to some degree of empirical
justification.  We have to be a bit careful about the latter, however.
Metaphysical 'givens' typically are those factors which are necessary for
observables to be possible, and thus are not on the level of 'observables'
themselves.  They are 'necessary conditions of possibility,' necessary
starting points (for the general empirical worldspace we inhabit).

Regarding the place of consciousness in the universe, there are basically
two possible positions:  it has a discrete beginning, or it is elemental or
primordial.  However, since consciousness is not something we can
objectively observe, both emergentism and panpsychism have similar problems
pointing to it in a definitive way.  We can point objectively to behaviors
that we usually correlate with consciousness of at least a particular level
of sophistication or development, but there are cases where consciousness
(here, qualitative experiencing or interiority) may be present even though
we can't observe any of those correlated behaviors, such as when a person
is in a coma or apparently brain-dead; and places where there is
conscious-like behavior, even though there may good reason to doubt there
is any coherent system-level consciousness or experiencing present (as in
the self-navigating activity of a Roomba).

Now, consciousness itself is perhaps the only thing we can know directly,
and therefore we must take it as real -- as an element or aspect of
reality.  I find the claim that consciousness is an illusion incoherent,
since 'illusion'  itself presupposes consciousness -- a kind of error in
experiencing, (ap)prehending, or knowing.  So, taking consciousness as real
(at least as minimally described, as a potential for qualitative experience
or what-it's-like-ness, and for the registration of difference), we must
ask how/where it is situated.  Idealism is one of the possibilities, but
I'm not going to deal with it here.  I'll stick to the main themes of David
and Matt's video: panpsychism and emergentism.

The main argument that panpsychists usually make against emergentism is
that emergentism doesn't solve the mystery of how consciousness emerges
from supposedly wholly non-qualitative and interiorless matter; it only
seeks to locate it along a timeline.  There are of course understandable
reasons for choosing to locate it at some particular points along the
evolutionary timeline than others.  If we're looking for (admittedly
biocentric) behavioral correlates of consciousness, we find those
correlates much more readily in amoebas or lizards than in stars.  But we
shouldn't mistake the reasonableness of this assertion for an actual
demonstration of the mechanisms of the emergence of consciousness, the
particular 'how' of the arising of qualitative experience out of wholly
insentient matter or chemistry.  No one, yet, has been able to offer any
plausible mechanisms or explanations for that.  But if we don't yet know
the mechanics of the generation of the qualitative out of the purely
quantitative, but we assume that it must nevertheless have started
somewhere, then there are definitely some more reasonable places to locate
that mystery than others.

But there are good reasons to remain dissatisfied with this promissory
account.  The emergence of the qualitative and experiential, out of wholly
insentient stuff, is a different order of emergence than is usually meant
by the term (which is applied to the emergence of new patterns of material
or energetic organization and behavior).  We don't know how it could be
done, and it is without scientific precedent.  This is not just the claim
of wishful thinkers; this is a growing claim among philosophers of mind,
who have continually run into dead ends with the emergence paradigm.

When, under certain paradigmatic assumptions, we continue to be frustrated
in our efforts to explain certain phenomena, sometimes it is justified to
fundamentally shift those assumptions.  We did this not long back with the
shift from a classical object-oriented worldview to a process-relational
open systems view.  Current paradigmatic assumptions (at the time) didn't
appear to be able to account for evolution, so we experimented with a
fundamental frame-shift and discovered this allowed for expanded and
renewed explanatory power.

Some philosophers of mind are entertaining a similar frame shift motivated
by the ongoing explanatory failures of the current emergentist paradigm.
We have been starting from the view that quantitative matter is primary and
qualitative consciousness/experience is derivative; what if we start,
instead, from the assumption that quantity and quality are equiprimordial?
This is not an irrational move, any more than the shift from an
object-oriented to a process-oriented view was irrational.  It can be
rationally justified and defended, and then tested for explanatory power.

If we consistently fail to be able to show how "this" gives rise to "that,"
in other words, then entertaining the idea that the "that" may not be,
after all, an effect of the "this" ... is not at all an irrational (or
psychologically weak or needy) move.  It's perfectly reasonable.

Nor is it a "God in the gaps" move.  Consciousness is not a postulated
mythological figure that we are trying to force-fit into a world that no
longer has a place for it, but a directly accessible feature of reality --
a justifiable given, as I argued above --, and we have two basic approaches
available to us to account for its place: it is derivative or elemental.
If one option has continued to run into dead ends, it makes sense to try
out the other and see what happens.

Since consciousness itself is not objectively observable -- the scientific
method doesn't let us "see" it either in the brain or out in the world --
some people complain that a panpsychic world would be practically
indistinguishable from a non-panpsychic or emergentist world.  There is
nothing immediately, at the level of scientifically observable, empirical
reality, that would set a panpsychist world behaviorally apart from an
emergentist one.  Instead, we have to look at the aporias, if any,
generated by our starting assumptions -- as we did with object-oriented
metaphysics vs. process metaphysics -- and decide which provides more
explanatory power or avoids certain problematic consequences.

Here's my view in a nutshell, which might be called a kind of panpsychic
emergentism.

My view is that the world we inhabit is indeed the physical-energetic world
that we deal with in science, but that matter-energy has been
underdescribed; every basic matter-energy event has a qualitative or
interior aspect to it.  At the level of elemental particle-events, the
interior or qualitative aspect is very basic and almost negligible,
especially as compared to higher organismic awareness.  Whitehead referred
to this elemental qualitative interiority as prehension -- the barest of
'registration' events.

Autopoietically self-organizing systems then increase not only in physical
complexity as they evolve, but in qualitative depth as well.  And I would
distinguish between autopoietic and allopoietic entities in this regard:
the former are organized, via internal relatedness, in such a way as to be
able to amplify interiority across the whole system, or at least across
some systems within systems; whereas in the latter, where order is imposed
from without, there is not enough internal coherence or
internal-relatedness of constituent elements to be able lead to the
amplification of interiority across the whole or parts of the system.  This
is generally in line with the autopoietic systems-science view that
autopoietic process *is* cognitive process.  In my view, cognition, in
part, is the processual interlinking of elements and systems which are, at
once, both energetic and qualitative.

(As a side note, I don't think there is an absolute line between
autopoietic and allopoietic; I expect we will gradually be able to mimic
autopoiesis more and more, through our technology, leading eventually to
the emergence of human-like or greater sentient machines ["artificial
organisms"]).

Of course, one of the problems that face this proto- or micro-panpsychist
account is the combination problem.  How are minimally 'conscious'
(prehensive) micro-events combined in a way to provide more holistic forms
of consciousness (across systems, organisms, etc)?  I think there are some
early contenders for mechanisms, such as the quantum coherence states
generated by microtubules that seem to be associated with waking
consciousness (in patients pre-anaesthesia).  But we don't know for sure
yet.

But in my view, the combination problem is less of a logical or ontological
problem than the one posed by the emergentist paradigm (which posits the
emergence of a radically new domain, a qualitative domain out of strictly
non-qualitative elements).  We already are tracking the emergence of
higher-order physical systems, with higher-level behavioral properties.  We
can then consider whether the higher-level behaviors that we associate with
conscious organisms involve 1) the irruption of a wholly new ontological
domain, subjective interiority out of objective interiority; or 2) the
amplification and higher-order expression of already
qualitative-quantitative elements.  In my view, the latter option is more
parsimonious and involves less of a theoretical problem or ontological leap.

There are of course multiple different panpsychic models, just as there are
several versions of emergentism.  Personally, I think physical emergence is
well established and it must be taken into account in any model of reality.
But as I just said, I think the most parsimonious and least theoretically
challenging option is to suggest that there are levels of interiority
running through all levels of physical emergence, rather than positing its
radical irruption somewhere along the line.

One unfortunately never-fully-developed 'panpsychic' model which attracts
me is David Bohm's soma-significance.  In his view, reality is a field with
a holistic superposition of soma (form) and significance at every point --
rather like a magnet, where north and south poles appear at distinct and
apparently separate 'points' but which are really just two aspects of a
holistic process.  (Break a magnet, and continue breaking it, and you have
new north and south poles for each piece).  At the quantum level, in his
account, every particle 'reads' the somatic form of its environment via a
pilot wave, and this influences its behavior.  Higher-level organisms
simply involve higher and more complex forms of this
soma-significant/signa-somatic interplay.

But as I said at the beginning, while I think there are some cosmological
models which are stronger and more compelling than others -- and I've just
given my view for why a basic panpsychic one is better than an emergentist
one --, we also are still in 'early days' in our accounting for this aspect
of reality and epistemic humility would require us to be willing to
entertain a plurality of options.  In my case, this means, first, a
willingness to explore several different forms of panpsychism, to test for
the greatest explanatory yield, consistency, etc; but also an openness to
at least seriously considering other fundamental theoretical and
metaphysical choices.


On Mon, Aug 24, 2020 at 2:11 AM Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx <
[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Hi TOK Folks,
>
>
>
>   Here is a blog to make you think
> <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.psychologytoday.com_us_blog_science-2Dand-2Dphilosophy_202008_what-2Ddoes-2Dartificial-2Dintelligence-2Dthink-2Dabout-2Dconsciousness&d=DwIFaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=DeS1p-8RjDYQhQbpzdvIg8ojqIVYUW8XNWPgSWZ0hQo&s=bHl6OTllRzRG28b97PieDKqKizEqzdlvNSl2EcpS1BE&e= >
> about mind, consciousness, and the future.
>
>
>
>   From a ToK System perspective, the 21st Century sees the transition
> from the Cultural-Personal into the Digital-MetaCultural dimension, which
> will be massively shaped by Person-AI interface embedded in the digital
> landscape (which, of course, is embedded in other landscapes, although, as
> this blog reminds us, the digital is, in some ways, potentially less
> embedded in the sense that the mediums of information processing and
> communication are not based in the Life-Mind world directly).
>
>
>
> I believe that if we were to design an AI system based on the language
> game provided by the ToK System, it would have not screwed up the answer,
> but would have clearly differentiated self-conscious (Mind3) from
> sentience/phenomenology (Mind2). Indeed, it would have said that it was
> “weird” relative to natural consciousness, as it had many features of
> self-consciousness but lacked sentience.
>
>
>
> Best,
>
> Gregg
>
> ___________________________________________
>
> Gregg Henriques, Ph.D.
> Professor
> Department of Graduate Psychology
> 216 Johnston Hall
> MSC 7401
> James Madison University
> Harrisonburg, VA 22807
> (540) 568-7857 (phone)
> (540) 568-4747 (fax)
>
>
> *Be that which enhances dignity and well-being with integrity.*
>
> Check out the Theory Of Knowledge homepage at:
>
> https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.toksociety.org_home&d=DwIFaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=DeS1p-8RjDYQhQbpzdvIg8ojqIVYUW8XNWPgSWZ0hQo&s=NkYIyxK1mQnD2UOajCtNiSZOnr3hr3MDo2DTvsRG1Is&e= 
> <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.toksociety.org_home&d=DwMFaQ&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=wjF8cZoiFchamTuxBdDEmw&m=57e2I6uWglJ4JwStWjClCslCp37381OxvNIxockoINI&s=aRdOGoP0Bdt7IhOV8uIntjmwOR6o8wiDviSHJrpgpaM&e=>
>
>
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