Physicalism's Ambiguity Problem - Is proving / disproving physicalism even possible?
JANUARY 3, 2024
A writing by Lance S. Bush prompted me to wonder whether either physicalism or non-physicalism could be proved, specifically whether it could be proved to my own personal satisfaction.
The title of this writing suggests that I’m about to challenge physicalism with some kind of problem. I am. But the problem actually cuts both ways, challenging both physicalism and anti-physicalism. I just gave this writing that title because I have a bias against physicalism. My bias also means I will describe the problem mostly in terms of how it challenges physicalism, instead of how it challenges anti-physicalism.
And, for all I know, the problem has been solved. Perhaps one of my readers will be kind enough to point me toward the problem’s resolution.
So I begin by stating the problem of ambiguity.
Given any conscious physical body, I can’t understand how anybody could distinguish between two alternative interpretations of the physical body’s relationship to it’s consciousness.
The first interpretation is the physicalist one. This interpretation claims that the physical body is literally an instance of consciousness. When we look at the physical body, we are looking directly at nothing more and nothing less than an instance of consciousness. That physical body literally is what consciousness looks like to we observers.
The second interpretation is the anti-physicalist one. This interpretation claims the physical body is not literally an instance of consciousness, but merely causally connected to it’s non-physical consciousness. In this interpretation, we say things like “The physical body is conscious” or “It has consciousness” or “It has the property of being conscious”. But we refrain from the claim that it literally is an instance of consciousness qua consciousness.
So the ambiguity is between whether a physical body is consciousness or has consciousness.
My intuitions about this ambiguity arise from the fantasy of being invited to some laboratory where a scientist points to a blob on a table and tells me “This physical blob is pure, raw consciousness. The blob is the minimum physical complexity required for it to be an instance of consciousness. And it has no other function but to be aware. It is nothing less and nothing more than an instance of consciousness.”
I grant that the blob is conscious. But I still can’t tell whether the blob literally is an instance of consciousness, or whether the blob is instead just the minimum physical complexity to cause the blob to have consciousness – the minimum physical apparatus required to cause a non-physical phenomena, which in this case would be consciousness.
Again, the problem is I can’t tell which interpretation is true. And furthermore, I can’t imagine how anyone could tell, ever.
This ambiguity problem availed itself to me when I asked myself the question: “What argument or evidence could convince me that physicalism was true?” In trying to answer that question, I bottomed out at this ambiguity problem.
As a candidate for a solution to the ambiguity, one whimsical idea flashed into my imagination. What if the blob actually looked like an instance consciousness to me? What would a literal instance of consciousness even look like? I imagined that when I looked at the blob, I had a kind of double vision experience, wherein I could see the blob as a normal physical object, but also see what the blob was seeing. The space the blob occupied in my visual field would have these two visual experiences superimposed. But the general idea is that, to be aware of the blob would necessarily cause one to directly experience the blob’s awareness. The experiences of the blob would be plainly available to any observer, removing any “problem of privileged access” or “problem of other minds”.
But even if I had this double vision experience, it would still fail to resolve the ambiguity. Even if I can get direct access to the blob's experiences, I can't tell whether this means I'm having access to the blob that is consciousness, or merely having access to the non-physical consciousness that the blob has.
Well, aside from this blob-based candidate for a resolution, what I find most interesting about the ambiguity problem is that it sidesteps other decoy arguments presented by our continuing advances in artificial intelligence. Even if we can make an artificial intelligence that really is conscious, the ambiguity problem would still apply to it. We still can’t tell whether the physical artificial consciousness literally was a literal instance of consciousness or just had non-physical consciousness.
But now there is also the “knowing how it physically works” argument, like this:
Premise: We made the artificial consciousness by manipulating physical stuff into a physical device and thus know how it physically works.
Conclusion: The artificial consciousness can only be physical.
This argument seems somewhat plausible to me. It might resolve the problem of ambiguity for me if done right.
But I’m skeptical of the premise. Does knowing how consciousness physically works exhaust the knowledge of how it works? When I ponder this, I think it is also plausible that we could mistake our knowledge of how the physical prerequisites of consciousness works for complete knowledge of how consciousness works. So I see no fully satisfying resolution to the ambiguity here.
To do the argument right, well, I don’t yet know how the argument could be done right for me. I leave this an open issue.
Within the open-ness of the issue there lay some other complications for me that I want to mention.
The first is my skepticism as to whether physicality exists objectively, as an intrinsic property of existence, independently of consciousness. I lean toward a hypothesis that physicality is not intrinsic to existence, but is instead an appearance created by the interaction between consciousness and an existence that otherwise has no appearance; does not look like anything, i.e., has no spatial extension or duration – both required for physicality. This I explain in my writing called “Against Metaphysical Continua”. But anyway, if this hypothesis is correct, then consciousness cannot be physical in any metaphysically objective sense, since nothing is physical in that sense. And it would also mean that we would need to reduce physicality to the functions of consciousness, rather than the other way around.
As such, I entertain the notion that consciousness has some pre-physical aspects, some of which will be evident in our experience as conscious beings. Some of these pre-physical aspects might be those which seem independent of space. Example: when I perceive a boulder protruding out of the ground, I am aware of the whole boulder without sensory evident knowledge of how big the boulder is. Whether the boulder extends 6 feet or six miles below the ground, I am aware of all of the boulder. My awareness of the parts of the boulder not visible to my senses are space-independent. I might even go so far as to claim that all awareness is actually fundamentally space-independent. (I explore this idea further in this writing here.)
So, if consciousness has space-independent aspects like this, it might demonstrate that consciousness has physically independent aspects, as physicality depends on space. And such space-independent aspects may also defy our attempts to quantify them and account for them in a physical machine, thus flouting our attempts to make artificial consciousness. [More speculation on this idea here.] But, although it would flout our normal methods for making artificial consciousness, we might succeed by means of a new approach, such as by making the physical substrate that causally interacts with non-physical phenomena. We'd first have to discover the causal interactions and capitalize on them.
Now I'll offer a sketch of how this might go.
Perhaps we might have more success creating artificial consciousness by first realizing that everything is intrinsically non-physical. Then, as we build the “physical machine” that becomes conscious, we view our project differently.
First, we understand that the physical items we use to construct our machine are not intrinsically physical. They are consciousness-generated analogs of non-physical phenomena. As such, we are open to the idea that other non-physical phenomena may have no consciousness-generated physical analogs, such that we can’t normally detect them.
Second, we suspect that consciousness may be one of these non-physical phenomena with no physical analog.
Third, we suspect that we can manipulate normally undetectable non-physical phenomena by manipulating the non-physical phenomena that do have physical analogs.
Fourth, we take stabs at producing consciousness by manipulating the normally undetectable non-physical components of consciousness that way, and in just the right way.
Fifth, For clues on how to do the fourth thing, we look to the physically analoged items associated with natural consciousness, such as the neuro-networks of brains.
Well, anyway, my skepticism about intrinsic physicality is one of the open issues that contribute to my skepticism about resolving physicalism’s ambiguity problem.
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