Translator: Maria K. Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
Thanks for organizing this.
And thanks for coming to listen to me talk.
So, you guys are all conscious, I hope.
(Laughter)
You have a stream of experiences, including imagery thoughts,
perceptual experiences, emotional experiences.
There's something it's like to be you,
while there's nothing it's like to be the shoes on the feet,
or the chairs you're sitting in -
at least, that's what we ordinarily think.
So now consider: What is it about you that makes you special, in that way?
One possibility is this: You have an immaterial soul,
and your shoes don't.
There's something non-physical, a spirit,
that's in some way attached to your physical body.
And really, it's that spirit, not your body, that's conscious.
Maybe that spirit could even continue to exist
into some sort of afterlife, so after your body dies.
Now that view, called mind-body dualism,
is pretty appealing.
But one question that immediately arises is this:
Is your dog conscious?
Does your dog have a stream of emotional experiences,
perceptual experiences ...
Is there's something it's like to be a dog?
It seems natural to say
that yes, dogs, too, are different from chairs and shoes in that way.
So, dogs, too, must have immaterial souls on this view, right?
And if dogs do, then mice, right?
They're not very different sorts of animal.
And if mice, then sharks and pigeons.
If sharks and pigeons, then salmon?
If salmon, then grasshoppers?
If grasshoppers, then earthworms?
If earthworms, then smaller worms and smaller down to microorganisms?
Do bacteria have immaterial souls?
Viruses?
Strands of DNA?
Carbon chains and petroleum?
Who exactly is in and who is out of the immaterial soul club?
So if you're a dualist, this is an important question.
So, here are four options:
One, is you can say,
only human beings have immaterial souls.
Only we have afterlives. Only we have religious salvation.
There's a kind of cleanliness to that idea.
But if the soul is the locus of conscious experience,
and if your dog doesn't have one, then your dog has no experience.
There's nothing it's like to be a dog.
Your dog does not have perceptual experiences.
It doesn't have emotional experiences.
That seems pretty strange, pretty hard to accept.
So, here's another option.
Everybody and everything is in: humans, dogs, frogs, worms,
viruses, carbon chains,
lone hydrogen ions in outer space ...
We're all conscious!
Everybody's got an immaterial soul.
That also seems weird.
Third off,
there's a line in the sand somewhere.
There's a sharp demarcation somewhere
between beings with and beings without conscious experiences.
But that seems weird too.
Across the spectrum of animals,
there's a smooth gradation in psychological capacities.
Given this smooth gradation, how could there be a sharp line
between the ensouled and the unensouled creatures?
What?
Toads in, frogs out?
I talked to a cognitive ethologist once who thought that was exactly the line.
(Laughs)
Grasshoppers in, crickets out?
I mean, if the immaterial soul is the locus of conscious experience,
it ought to do some work.
There ought to be big cognitive differences
between beings with and beings without immaterial souls,
but the only remotely plausible place it seems to draw a sharp line
is between human beings and all the rest, and that puts us back in option one.
Alright, so here's the fourth option: Maybe we don't have to draw a sharp line.
Maybe having a soul is not an on-or-off thing.
Maybe there's a smooth gradation of ensoulment
so that some animals - frogs? - kind of have immaterial souls.
But that's weird too.
What would it mean to kind of, or halfway, have an immaterial soul?
Isn't an immaterial soul the kind of thing you either have or you don't have?
Immateriality doesn't seem like one of these vague properties,
like being red, or being tall, of which there are degrees and in-between cases.
So I'm not saying that there aren't immaterial souls.
But if there are, something bizarre is going to have to be true
about non-human animals.
So maybe materialism is tempting.
According to materialism, nobody has an immaterial soul!
There's no such things.
We are just wholly physical beings,
naturally evolved,
and maybe that natural evolution allows for consciousness to evolve gradually
without any sudden pocket of an immaterial soul.
Scientists often like this option.
But materialism is weird too.
According to materialism, what's special about us is our brains.
Brains - that's what makes us conscious.
But what's so wonderful about brains
so that they give rise to consciousness,
while a similar mix of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen
in chicken soup
isn't conscious?
What's the difference?
Well, surely it has something to do with how brains are organized.
Something about how much information brains can process,
information they can use to guide behavior in a somewhat intelligent way,
in response to environmental inputs.
And somehow,
conscious experience comes along with this information processing
and environmental responsiveness once they get sophisticated enough.
So now consider this:
Is the United States conscious?
I mean, in addition to the streams of conscious experience,
the individual streams of conscious experience
that every person in the United States presumably has,
is there also some further stream of experience distinct from those
that's the experience of the group organism
composed of all of those citizens and residents?
Seems bizarre to think so,
and yet, it's hard to see why not, on a materialist theory.
There's certainly a lot of information transfer going on
within the United States.
You have about a 100 billion neurons in your head;
the US has only about 300 million people,
but those people trade a lot of information.
You all right now, for example, are getting information
not only from the content of my words, but also auditory and visual information,
substantially in excess of what you get from high-speed streaming video.
Not much of this information will get into your long-term memory, of course,
but the same is true of information transfer between neurons.
If sophisticated information transfer
is sufficient to make the system conscious,
the US would seem to qualify.
Now, mere quantity of information transfer alone
probably isn't enough for consciousness.
There probably needs to be some sort of organization
of that information
in the service of some coordinated, goal-directed responsiveness.
Maybe too, there needs to be some sort of capacity
for self-monitoring or self-representation.
But the United States has those things too.
The United States responds intelligently or semi-intelligently
to opportunities and threats, not less intelligently, I think,
than small mammals that we normally think are conscious.
Al-Qaeda strikes New York, the United States mounts a response.
The United States invades Iraq.
This is coordinated group activity.
Involves some kind of perceptual responsiveness to inputs -
the army goes around the mountain, doesn't crash into it.
The CIA detects the location of Saddam Hussein.
Is there less information, less coordination, less intelligence
than in a mammal?
The Pentagon monitors the actions of the army
and its own actions.
It evaluates its members and the success of its operations.
The Census Bureau counts us;
the State Department announces what the US position is on foreign affairs.
The Congress passes a resolution declaring that we hate tyranny
and love apple pie.
This is self-representation.
Show me a materialist theory on which it isn't.
We seem to have all of the elements required for consciousness,
according to materialist theories
that aim to explain what's so special about the brain
in virtue of which brains get to be conscious.
If brains are conscious,
and if you accept one of the leading materialist theories
about why this is the case,
you probably ought also to accept
that the United States is literally conscious.
Now, the United States is a spatially distributed entity
composed of conscious organisms,
individually conscious human beings.
But why should that matter?
Consider spatial distribution:
Why should sheer size make consciousness disappear
as long as there's intelligence or intelligence-innate responsiveness?
We can imagine planet-sized aliens.
Would they automatically not have conscious experience?
We can imagine beings with brains that are split in half or in quarters,
that communicate by radio signal.
Under certain evolutionary conditions,
maybe large or spatially discontinuous organisms
could evolve naturally and be as intelligent as we are,
as conscious as we are,
write philosophical essays as sophisticated as ours.
It seems mere morphological prejudice
to insist that conscious beings be spatially compact.
Does it matter that the United States is composed of organisms, us,
that are individually conscious?
I don't see why.
Consider a far-fetched example:
Tomorrow, space aliens come.
They learn English.
They chat with us about our movies,
they trade in technology with us and precious metals.
Maybe they even intermarry with us.
They say they're conscious.
They act like they are.
They write philosophical treatises about consciousness.
They write medical treatises about their pain,
psychological treatises about imagery experiences,
about emotional phenomenology.
It would seem bizarre to think that they had no stream of experience.
You can imagine the outraged cries of speciesism
if someone were to suggest the idea.
But when we look in their heads, here's what we find:
Lots and lots of tiny little bugs swarming around in intricate networks.
These aliens are much evolved descendants of bee colonies.
It could be that the beings in their heads,
those little bees, are all individually conscious
with animal-like conscious experience, while the organism as a whole
has human-like consciousness and intelligence.
The beings might not know that they're part of this larger conscious organism,
might even find the idea ridiculous if they could understand it.
Now although that example's far-fetched,
it illuminates the naturalness of the idea
that if you're going to be a materialist,
what should matter is the functional organization
of the material of which you're composed,
and not whether that information processing
happens to be implemented by conscious organisms.
Maybe we're like those bees,
and the United States is the larger organism.
A planet-sized alien who squints
might look at the US and see a single diffuse organism
consuming bananas and automobiles, invading Iraq, exuding waste.
If across billions of galaxies, patterns of intelligent responsiveness
can evolve in myriad strange and diverse ways,
which it seems they could,
it would be oddly chauvenistic to insist that our particular way
of being intelligently responsive
is the only way that involves genuine conscious experience.
Common sense ...
has not proven
a great guide
to fundamental physics and cosmology.
Think about all the weirdness of quantum mechanics,
all the weirdness of relativity theory.
The more we learn about the basic structure of the universe,
the stranger things seem to get
and the more we have to leave common sense behind.
The same might be true of the metaphysics of mind.
Let's say that a claim is bizarre
if it's contrary to common sense.
And let's say further that a claim is crazy
if it's contrary to common sense
and there's no compelling reason to believe it.
Panpsychism is crazy.
Panpsychism is the view that everything, everywhere is conscious,
the idea the United States is conscious.
That's crazy!
Or seems to be, right?
But something crazy might be true.
I think careful inspection reveals that on certain issues
something crazy must be true.
Quantum mechanics is a plausible example.
Consider interpretations of quantum theory.
They're all bizarre.
The world is constantly splitting into infinitely many.
Or maybe the world stays the same,
and your mind is constantly splitting into infinitely many.
Or maybe you're backwardly causing the history of the universe
by recurring acts of scientific observation.
These options are all bizarre.
They're all crazy.
It's hard to choose one right one from among them.
So let's say
that the view that something crazy must be true about X
is "crazyism about X."
I'm a crazyist about the metaphysics of mind.
There are lots of options.
They're all bizarre; they're all weirdly contrary to common sense.
It's hard to find grounds for choosing one among them.
And yet, one of the options, crazy though it might seem,
must be true.
Thank you.
(Applause)