You make some excellent points. It baffles me why anyone would think materialism is necessary for science. It indicates a serious misunderstanding of metaphysics.
You write: "Popperian falsifiability is a standard for scientific theories, not for philosophical or metaphysical positions in general; "
I would want to disagree a little here. A metaphysical theory must be falsifiable in logic, and it seems relevant that the Buddha tells us not to take any notice of ideas that are unverifiable. It seems to me that it would take only a minor tweak to extend Popper's falsifiability criterion to cover metaphysics and mysticism.
Philosophers often seem reluctant to admit that metaphysical theories are falsifiable, preferring to juggle a thousand balls at once rather than using logic to reduce the number, but this doesn't mean their theories are unfalsifiable.
Thanks, Tim, for seeing this point. Most people seem to assume falsifiability implies empiricism, but there's more than one way to skin a cat. Restricting it to empiricism drags one into scientism.
I haven't finished reading yet, but I needed to stop to correct your misunderstanding of "Cartesian materialism" and the "Cartesian theatre". You wrote,
> Dennett (1991) describes a similar phenomenon, coining the term “Cartesian materialism” to refer to the belief that one is a physicalist, when in reality one holds a Cartesian dualist position or uses imprecise dualistic language. In actuality, the majority of neuroscientists use terms such as “enters consciousness”, which, according to Dennett, implies the incorrect notion of a “Cartesian theatre”.
But he's not saying that these people are in reality Cartesian dualists at all. He wrote,
> Let’s call the idea of such a centered locus in the brain Cartesian materialism, since it’s the view you arrive at when you discard Descartes’s dualism but fail to discard the imagery of a central (but material) Theater where “it all comes together.” The pineal gland would be one candidate for such a Cartesian Theater, but there are others that have been suggested — the anterior cingulate, the reticular formation, various places in the frontal lobes. Cartesian materialism is the view that there is a crucial finish line or boundary somewhere in the brain, marking a place where the order of arrival equals the order of “presentation” in experience because what happens there is what you are conscious of.
It doesn't involve any dualism, implicitly or explicitly. What makes it "Cartesian" is not any kind of dualism, but the idea of a single central conscious self, like a material res cogitans somewhere in the brain.
Point taken, will correct that later. However I think the overarching point, that some people smuggle in the architecture of dualism (although not an observer separate from the brain processes), is still entirely valid. I got this point from the consciousness book I am reading (might not have been 100% accurate)...
V interesting article! its great to see a nuanced view on this issue. I love thinking about these broader methodological questions, I basically argued for a particular position on this issue in my dissertation, though not a popular position. I would describe the sciences of the 'mind' as strictly studying the brain or mind/brain to show no distinction between them, and think of the 'mind' as an ordinarily language term that can be used descriptively in the sciences but that also has usage in everyday language that is untouched by any scientific claims (neither proved nor disproved) in the sciences of the mind. Completely agree with you, that due to the history of dualism and what not, we have many far from neutral perspectives in a whole host of fields today
I think your approach here is inconsistent. On the one hand you say that "science" is metaphysically agnostic, but then you also are claiming that all the scientists think and talk in physicalist terms. Do you just mean "science as *I* imagine it"? "Science in the ideal"? Whose ideal?
But the bigger issue is that you're treating physicalism/idealism as both an unfalsifiable metaphysics with no empirical implications, and as a scientific paradigm/research program. It can't be both. Neuroscience largely operates on the materialistic basis that the brain creates/is the mind because that paradigm has allowed us to make better progress than competing paradigms.
Of course scientists are welcome to produce competing paradigms with different metaphysical assumptions, and IIT is a good and prominent example of this. It might even become the dominant paradigm one day. But the reason it is respectable science is that it makes testable predictions, and stakes its claim as a competing paradigm. It is not hiding behind unfalsifiability and metaphysics.
Similarly, if psychedelics or placebo effects can offer any support for idealism then it must have empirical implications, and so must be able to make testable predictions ahead of time.
If you take idealism etc as unfalsifiable metaphysics which doesn't make any predictions, and only interprets things after the fact, it is irrelevant to science and can be ignored. If you take it as a scientific paradigm (like materialism has effectively been in neuroscience) then it needs to actually do the work and get the results.
That is actually a good point for clarification (thanks for constructive criticism). Tbh it's not easy to answer, because I thought about this question a lot while writing this article, but I will try to make it clear what I mean.
When I say "science is metaphysically agnostic," I am referring strictly to the empirical scientific method. The actual process of conducting science, formulating testable hypotheses, collecting MRI data, observing brain activity correlating with a specific state, does not require a specific metaphysical commitment. However, how we interpret those results to make ontological claims about the nature of consciousness is where philosophy steps in (which btw is not the case for a good chunk of neuroscientific research). In areas like psychedelic research, consciousness research, but also affective neuroscience etc. these background assumptions heavily influence our conclusions and can theoretically introduce bias.
I agree that scientific hypotheses must make testable predictions though. E.g. does the brain activity we observe during psychedelic states increase, decrease or get more '“chaotic”. Because obviously we still are bound to empirical methods and observation. But when we then start saying that the observed is all there is or that science itself exhausts “reality in itself”, I think that is a philosophical claim.
The boundary between science and philosophy is undeniably continuous and often blurry. So because of this, a more accurate phrasing for my article wouldn't be "science is metaphysically agnostic," but maybe rather something like: "The methodology of science is metaphysically agnostic, but the theoretical frameworks we use to interpret its findings, on the mind are not (when they make ontological claims about reality)."
Very nice article. I really appreciate bringing up this topic in your postings. I have a small comment on your conclusion.
"I am not calling for a revolution in science, but for a more modest change: that researchers in neuroscience, psychology and other fields take the philosophical foundations of their work seriously, and that academia embraces diversity rather than treating it as a distraction."
Why do you have to tone down your opinion and say "I am not calling for a revolution in science"? Consider the following points:
1. The requirement for academicians to be aware of their metaphysical positions is irrefutable (If academicians claim to be doing science).
2. In light of point 1, the current situation is necessarily far from the expected, it terms of how well the diversity is embraced in academia. "Necessarily" far because
a) One needs to write an article about this
b) They further need to tone down their statement about it
3. Given this the change you are asking for does not seem to be modest and is actually a call for a revolution.
4. There is nothing wrong in calling for such a revolution because of point 1.
I am enjoying your journey. You are ready to pursue your PhD! The philosophical foundations of psychology have exponential implications for treatment. I think of this like a degree of arc: 2% error is very small in close proximity but impactful at length. Or the foundation of the house determines its structural integrity and longevity. Most clinical psychologists (at least, in the US) get little philosophical training or brush through metaphysics sufficiently for their dissertation. I wrestled hard with the most fundamental philosophical assumptions to ensure my research and clinical practice were coherent without metaphysical contortionism and patchwork theories. And that is good science! Most empiricists are blind to their assumptions and operate on dogma equivalent to religious fundamentalism. If you pursue a PhD, you will learn about alternative forms of research useful for different designs and approaches to science, with different applications and ways of ascertaining truth. True, these forms of research do not tend to get funding, but it does get done regularly and is respected by certain academic institutions and programs.
Bennet and Hacker called it brain-body dualism. Researchers from John Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research do a pretty good job at integrating broader metaphysical and cultural frameworks. Good work!
Couldn't agree more with your point that the prevailing view among "materialists" who poo-poo dualism is actually dualism. Dualism by far dominates scientists view of the brain today, even though they stubbornly insist it's materialism. Go figure 🤷🏻♂️
I know a lot of neuroscientists, neurologists, neurosurgeons and neuropsychologists. At odds with your claims, none of them seem to be dualistic in any metaphysically interesting way. They all, of necessity, use dualistic metaphors to distinguish between objective and subjective perspectives, in the same way that most people in the computer industry switch effortlessly between hardware and software, between low-level code and high-level software objects, between world-models and the first-person perspective of agent-models, and so on. None of this is at odds with physicalism. None of it is dualism in the way that raises metaphysical concerns.
There can be points within cognitive neuropsychology where the spectre of Cartesian materialism arises, but convincing examples of this causing any actual issues of interpretation are rare. In most cases, when neurologists talk about something "entering consciousness", they are making a functional statement about real events, not engaging in confused metaphysical speculation. Patients are conscious of some things, and not conscious of other things; an objective disturbance showing up on an EEG might enter consciousness or not, and this is worth noting. In the interpretation of Libet's experiments and a few other situations, then Dennett's point is an important correction to naive views of a central moment of something entering consciousness, but that does not generalise to all uses of the phrase "enters consciousness".
You are asking these professionals to waste time thinking about the Hard Problem, which itself explicitly aims only at explanatory leftovers after all observable and functional processes have been explained. The explanatory in-box for the Hard Problem is a bunch of vague intuitions, which are appropriately ignored by people who have to deal with real brains, and which cannot, by definition, be subjected to any scientific analysis. Epiphenomenalism is rife within panppsychism, some forms of idealism, in property dualism, strong emergentism, and so on. It is appropriate for all such views to be rejected on logical grounds, but, even if they had some merit, they are entirely outside the domain that is explorable with the tools of science.
Saddling neuroscience with the endless circular debates of philosophy of the mind would be a grave error. The has already been too much contamination of the science of consciousness with the ill-posed concerns of people like Chalmers. Those who are interested in such things can still pursue them; nothing stops them except the overwhelming suspicion that panpsychism, etc, are intellectually bankrupt. The almost complete lack of interest in thought experiments and the like among neuroscientists is entirely appropriate.
You might as well ask that civil engineers stop work until someone solves the sorites paradox.
Physicalism is not the same as idealism or panpsychism because the method to arrive at a physicalist conclusion is way different.
Physicalism is the outcome of the scientific process, not the starting point.
We have discovered the physical basis of our own living bodies, of all other life on earth, of the planets, and the stars, and asteroids + comets.
We know that atomic matter is the basis of all of those physical objects. Science discovered physicalism. We have the periodic table based on that information and humans have created the atomic bomb based on the discovery of physicalism within science. But that does not stop science from continuing to ask questions like what are atoms made up of.
There is no physicalist who begins with the declaration that the only things that exist are physical. That is not the starting point of any scientist I've ever heard of.
Physicalism is the result of doing science and discovering what we are made up of without adding extra stuff.
That's why quantum physics is the last refuge of the increasingly desperate anti-physicalists. It's the only place they could try to squeeze their ideas into physicalist science at this point in time.
So a physicalist will look at quarks and leptons quantum entangled in an atomic structure and explain an atom just like that.
A non-physicalist would say quarks and leptons are quantum entangled in an atomic structure because there's an unobservable, unfalsifiable underlying fundamental mind that guides them into that state of existence.
So while physicalism is the outcome of the scientific process, idealism and panpsychism are more like religious beliefs that demand all of the evidence within science must be interpreted within that framework.
Panpsychist and idealists will cling on to their beliefs no matter what the evidence shows to the contrary or what the evidence fails to show altogether.
If tomorrow we discovered a consciousness wave beaming in our mental experience from the outside of our physical bodies, you would see all science-minded physicalists immediately switch over to some sort of dualism because that's where the evidence would lead.
But if you would explain the exact mechanism through which our consciousness emerges to a non-physicalist, they would just continue to declare that there must be some sort of fundamental thing missing anyway and maintain their belief despite not having any evidence to back it up.
At the end of the day though I agree with your point that we should have more people studying consciousness clearly explain their own philosophical views on metaphysics. That's why I end my post "Consciousness: Science versus Philosophy" with an endorsement of science to study consciousness and a warning to not waste your time studying too much philosophy of mind.
I read a good amount of his work already but if there's a point he made you're thinking I'm missing, feel free to explain.
For me when it comes to studying consciousness I actually found it extremely rewarding to study the work of Charles Darwin, Frans de Waal, and Todd Feinberg + John Mallatt.
To me I like the naturalistic physicalist approach to explaining consciousness because it best answers my questions about my own mental life.
When I want to understand my own consciousness I want to know what is happening to me when I am hearing a symphony, or seeing a sunset, or tasting coffee, which gives rise to my experiences. I want to know why my mental experiences go away when I go to sleep and why they come back when I wake up.
All of that can be explained by looking at my physical body and the processes my own body is going through which generates and sustains those mental experiences.
I've never thought that describing how my eye takes in light and my brain processes that information is somehow inadequate to explaining my visual consciousness.
I do not feel the need to add some extra idealist or panpsychist fundamental mind in order to explain the emergence of my conscious experiences from my own body.
What I actually find extremely unscientific and unrewarding is attributing a fundamental mind that has absolutely no connection to my physical body to explain my own conscious experience.
That's another reason physicalism is different than idealism. Physicalism started with the evidence and build an explanation out of it. Idealism/Panpsychism begin with a predetermined explanation and just claims the evidence is compatible with it without any explanation of how.
So what do you think about his transcendental idealism as well as the indirect realism that emerged from his critique? Because I think that kind of shows that science definitely does not equal physicalism. This is especially a problem when you look at the phenomena, Noumena distinction for naive physicalism imo (wrote about that in my last piece on idealism). Again I am not an idealist or panpsychist myself. All I am saying is that they should not be categorically off limits for doing research. Because science definitely doesn't lead to physicalism. Again physicalism is a metaphysical theory, science cannot show what reality truly is in itself (which is why I pointed to Kant).
I just think we come at it from very different perspectives...
1st
For Kant’s challenges, my understanding is that his point was that we do not experience nature as it exists but instead are aware of it through our own mental representations. That makes a lot of sense to me given evolution and Frans De Waal's description of an Evolutionary Umwelt.
Did you ever read the "Qualia" post of mine I shared with you a while ago?
In it I talk about the range of human conscious experience and its limitations. Like how a bat can hear at higher frequencies than a human and an elephant could hear lower frequencies than we can. I talk about how a pigeon can see different wavelengths of light than we can because the have cone receptors we lack. And if you consider speed there are things too slow for us to visually observe like grass growing or way too fast to see like a mantis shrimp striking its prey. So our consciousness is constrained by our biology and that is a good point to know from Kant.
But science relies on tools more than just human observation and I thank that gives us knowledge of nature as it exists rather than through our perspective. Like we don't see atoms or electrons or quarks and without using tools to study matter beyond just human perspective we would have no idea about any of that. Radioactive decay is something humankind would never find out about through our own biological perspective. So we do learn through empiricism about nature as it truly exists, at least in my perspective.
2nd
Another important difference in our views is that I don't think any scientist starts doing science by claiming that all of nature must be physical and therefore we can only understand our observations through that lens.
I don't take physicalism to be an a priori metaphysical position. To me, science begins with a metaphysical commitment to empiricism. Physicalism is the result of empirical science in my opinion.
At the start of the scientific enlightenment there were dualists like Rene Descartes who would just assert that humans are made up of our physical body plus a completely separate immaterial soul disconnected from our physical body.
Scientists took an alternative approach of just looking at what we are made of and not adding anything extra that is not observed.
Using tools like microscopes we found that we are made up of cells, then using stronger microscopes we saw that those cells were made up of organelles. Science learned through observation that organelles are made up of molecules and molecules are made up of atoms.
So science discovered the physical basis of humans, and all living things as a physical thing called an atom. Scientists like Dimitri Mendeleev created the periodic table based on that type of information. The periodic table represents what we know about the atomic basis of all the planets and stars and everything in the universe including us.
So the atomic, physical basis of us and our universe is a discovery of science.
Anyways, this turned out to be a very long comment. Hope it wasn't too rough to get through!
Just drop the ism's. All of them. Then start with finding any one single philosophy anywhere that actually represents the fundamental principles of Nature. Model from that. Throw out all the old shit. It never worked in the first place. Look at how fucked up people are these days. Science is the cause, not the solution.
I read the article. I get where you're coming from. Great. But Tim, you're trying to put lipstick on a pig. A dress on a turd. Really; get rid of the ism's.
You make some excellent points. It baffles me why anyone would think materialism is necessary for science. It indicates a serious misunderstanding of metaphysics.
You write: "Popperian falsifiability is a standard for scientific theories, not for philosophical or metaphysical positions in general; "
I would want to disagree a little here. A metaphysical theory must be falsifiable in logic, and it seems relevant that the Buddha tells us not to take any notice of ideas that are unverifiable. It seems to me that it would take only a minor tweak to extend Popper's falsifiability criterion to cover metaphysics and mysticism.
Philosophers often seem reluctant to admit that metaphysical theories are falsifiable, preferring to juggle a thousand balls at once rather than using logic to reduce the number, but this doesn't mean their theories are unfalsifiable.
Thank you! What you are saying makes sense. I guess “empirical falsifiability” is a more accurate description of what I was describing.
Thanks, Tim, for seeing this point. Most people seem to assume falsifiability implies empiricism, but there's more than one way to skin a cat. Restricting it to empiricism drags one into scientism.
I haven't finished reading yet, but I needed to stop to correct your misunderstanding of "Cartesian materialism" and the "Cartesian theatre". You wrote,
> Dennett (1991) describes a similar phenomenon, coining the term “Cartesian materialism” to refer to the belief that one is a physicalist, when in reality one holds a Cartesian dualist position or uses imprecise dualistic language. In actuality, the majority of neuroscientists use terms such as “enters consciousness”, which, according to Dennett, implies the incorrect notion of a “Cartesian theatre”.
But he's not saying that these people are in reality Cartesian dualists at all. He wrote,
> Let’s call the idea of such a centered locus in the brain Cartesian materialism, since it’s the view you arrive at when you discard Descartes’s dualism but fail to discard the imagery of a central (but material) Theater where “it all comes together.” The pineal gland would be one candidate for such a Cartesian Theater, but there are others that have been suggested — the anterior cingulate, the reticular formation, various places in the frontal lobes. Cartesian materialism is the view that there is a crucial finish line or boundary somewhere in the brain, marking a place where the order of arrival equals the order of “presentation” in experience because what happens there is what you are conscious of.
It doesn't involve any dualism, implicitly or explicitly. What makes it "Cartesian" is not any kind of dualism, but the idea of a single central conscious self, like a material res cogitans somewhere in the brain.
Point taken, will correct that later. However I think the overarching point, that some people smuggle in the architecture of dualism (although not an observer separate from the brain processes), is still entirely valid. I got this point from the consciousness book I am reading (might not have been 100% accurate)...
V interesting article! its great to see a nuanced view on this issue. I love thinking about these broader methodological questions, I basically argued for a particular position on this issue in my dissertation, though not a popular position. I would describe the sciences of the 'mind' as strictly studying the brain or mind/brain to show no distinction between them, and think of the 'mind' as an ordinarily language term that can be used descriptively in the sciences but that also has usage in everyday language that is untouched by any scientific claims (neither proved nor disproved) in the sciences of the mind. Completely agree with you, that due to the history of dualism and what not, we have many far from neutral perspectives in a whole host of fields today
I think your approach here is inconsistent. On the one hand you say that "science" is metaphysically agnostic, but then you also are claiming that all the scientists think and talk in physicalist terms. Do you just mean "science as *I* imagine it"? "Science in the ideal"? Whose ideal?
But the bigger issue is that you're treating physicalism/idealism as both an unfalsifiable metaphysics with no empirical implications, and as a scientific paradigm/research program. It can't be both. Neuroscience largely operates on the materialistic basis that the brain creates/is the mind because that paradigm has allowed us to make better progress than competing paradigms.
Of course scientists are welcome to produce competing paradigms with different metaphysical assumptions, and IIT is a good and prominent example of this. It might even become the dominant paradigm one day. But the reason it is respectable science is that it makes testable predictions, and stakes its claim as a competing paradigm. It is not hiding behind unfalsifiability and metaphysics.
Similarly, if psychedelics or placebo effects can offer any support for idealism then it must have empirical implications, and so must be able to make testable predictions ahead of time.
If you take idealism etc as unfalsifiable metaphysics which doesn't make any predictions, and only interprets things after the fact, it is irrelevant to science and can be ignored. If you take it as a scientific paradigm (like materialism has effectively been in neuroscience) then it needs to actually do the work and get the results.
That is actually a good point for clarification (thanks for constructive criticism). Tbh it's not easy to answer, because I thought about this question a lot while writing this article, but I will try to make it clear what I mean.
When I say "science is metaphysically agnostic," I am referring strictly to the empirical scientific method. The actual process of conducting science, formulating testable hypotheses, collecting MRI data, observing brain activity correlating with a specific state, does not require a specific metaphysical commitment. However, how we interpret those results to make ontological claims about the nature of consciousness is where philosophy steps in (which btw is not the case for a good chunk of neuroscientific research). In areas like psychedelic research, consciousness research, but also affective neuroscience etc. these background assumptions heavily influence our conclusions and can theoretically introduce bias.
I agree that scientific hypotheses must make testable predictions though. E.g. does the brain activity we observe during psychedelic states increase, decrease or get more '“chaotic”. Because obviously we still are bound to empirical methods and observation. But when we then start saying that the observed is all there is or that science itself exhausts “reality in itself”, I think that is a philosophical claim.
The boundary between science and philosophy is undeniably continuous and often blurry. So because of this, a more accurate phrasing for my article wouldn't be "science is metaphysically agnostic," but maybe rather something like: "The methodology of science is metaphysically agnostic, but the theoretical frameworks we use to interpret its findings, on the mind are not (when they make ontological claims about reality)."
Nice presentation Tim!
thanks!
hell yeah. and your/Ed's/Lib’s commentary is keepin my wheels turnin 😎
Good Article! A lot of people treat their assumptions like they are just ‘the science’ when really they are still assumptions.
Very nice article. I really appreciate bringing up this topic in your postings. I have a small comment on your conclusion.
"I am not calling for a revolution in science, but for a more modest change: that researchers in neuroscience, psychology and other fields take the philosophical foundations of their work seriously, and that academia embraces diversity rather than treating it as a distraction."
Why do you have to tone down your opinion and say "I am not calling for a revolution in science"? Consider the following points:
1. The requirement for academicians to be aware of their metaphysical positions is irrefutable (If academicians claim to be doing science).
2. In light of point 1, the current situation is necessarily far from the expected, it terms of how well the diversity is embraced in academia. "Necessarily" far because
a) One needs to write an article about this
b) They further need to tone down their statement about it
3. Given this the change you are asking for does not seem to be modest and is actually a call for a revolution.
4. There is nothing wrong in calling for such a revolution because of point 1.
I would love to hear others' thoughts on this.
Good point. Maybe it IS a revolution.
I am enjoying your journey. You are ready to pursue your PhD! The philosophical foundations of psychology have exponential implications for treatment. I think of this like a degree of arc: 2% error is very small in close proximity but impactful at length. Or the foundation of the house determines its structural integrity and longevity. Most clinical psychologists (at least, in the US) get little philosophical training or brush through metaphysics sufficiently for their dissertation. I wrestled hard with the most fundamental philosophical assumptions to ensure my research and clinical practice were coherent without metaphysical contortionism and patchwork theories. And that is good science! Most empiricists are blind to their assumptions and operate on dogma equivalent to religious fundamentalism. If you pursue a PhD, you will learn about alternative forms of research useful for different designs and approaches to science, with different applications and ways of ascertaining truth. True, these forms of research do not tend to get funding, but it does get done regularly and is respected by certain academic institutions and programs.
Bennet and Hacker called it brain-body dualism. Researchers from John Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research do a pretty good job at integrating broader metaphysical and cultural frameworks. Good work!
Couldn't agree more with your point that the prevailing view among "materialists" who poo-poo dualism is actually dualism. Dualism by far dominates scientists view of the brain today, even though they stubbornly insist it's materialism. Go figure 🤷🏻♂️
Great article, well said.
Thank you!
I know a lot of neuroscientists, neurologists, neurosurgeons and neuropsychologists. At odds with your claims, none of them seem to be dualistic in any metaphysically interesting way. They all, of necessity, use dualistic metaphors to distinguish between objective and subjective perspectives, in the same way that most people in the computer industry switch effortlessly between hardware and software, between low-level code and high-level software objects, between world-models and the first-person perspective of agent-models, and so on. None of this is at odds with physicalism. None of it is dualism in the way that raises metaphysical concerns.
There can be points within cognitive neuropsychology where the spectre of Cartesian materialism arises, but convincing examples of this causing any actual issues of interpretation are rare. In most cases, when neurologists talk about something "entering consciousness", they are making a functional statement about real events, not engaging in confused metaphysical speculation. Patients are conscious of some things, and not conscious of other things; an objective disturbance showing up on an EEG might enter consciousness or not, and this is worth noting. In the interpretation of Libet's experiments and a few other situations, then Dennett's point is an important correction to naive views of a central moment of something entering consciousness, but that does not generalise to all uses of the phrase "enters consciousness".
You are asking these professionals to waste time thinking about the Hard Problem, which itself explicitly aims only at explanatory leftovers after all observable and functional processes have been explained. The explanatory in-box for the Hard Problem is a bunch of vague intuitions, which are appropriately ignored by people who have to deal with real brains, and which cannot, by definition, be subjected to any scientific analysis. Epiphenomenalism is rife within panppsychism, some forms of idealism, in property dualism, strong emergentism, and so on. It is appropriate for all such views to be rejected on logical grounds, but, even if they had some merit, they are entirely outside the domain that is explorable with the tools of science.
Saddling neuroscience with the endless circular debates of philosophy of the mind would be a grave error. The has already been too much contamination of the science of consciousness with the ill-posed concerns of people like Chalmers. Those who are interested in such things can still pursue them; nothing stops them except the overwhelming suspicion that panpsychism, etc, are intellectually bankrupt. The almost complete lack of interest in thought experiments and the like among neuroscientists is entirely appropriate.
You might as well ask that civil engineers stop work until someone solves the sorites paradox.
Physicalism is not the same as idealism or panpsychism because the method to arrive at a physicalist conclusion is way different.
Physicalism is the outcome of the scientific process, not the starting point.
We have discovered the physical basis of our own living bodies, of all other life on earth, of the planets, and the stars, and asteroids + comets.
We know that atomic matter is the basis of all of those physical objects. Science discovered physicalism. We have the periodic table based on that information and humans have created the atomic bomb based on the discovery of physicalism within science. But that does not stop science from continuing to ask questions like what are atoms made up of.
There is no physicalist who begins with the declaration that the only things that exist are physical. That is not the starting point of any scientist I've ever heard of.
Physicalism is the result of doing science and discovering what we are made up of without adding extra stuff.
That's why quantum physics is the last refuge of the increasingly desperate anti-physicalists. It's the only place they could try to squeeze their ideas into physicalist science at this point in time.
So a physicalist will look at quarks and leptons quantum entangled in an atomic structure and explain an atom just like that.
A non-physicalist would say quarks and leptons are quantum entangled in an atomic structure because there's an unobservable, unfalsifiable underlying fundamental mind that guides them into that state of existence.
So while physicalism is the outcome of the scientific process, idealism and panpsychism are more like religious beliefs that demand all of the evidence within science must be interpreted within that framework.
Panpsychist and idealists will cling on to their beliefs no matter what the evidence shows to the contrary or what the evidence fails to show altogether.
If tomorrow we discovered a consciousness wave beaming in our mental experience from the outside of our physical bodies, you would see all science-minded physicalists immediately switch over to some sort of dualism because that's where the evidence would lead.
But if you would explain the exact mechanism through which our consciousness emerges to a non-physicalist, they would just continue to declare that there must be some sort of fundamental thing missing anyway and maintain their belief despite not having any evidence to back it up.
At the end of the day though I agree with your point that we should have more people studying consciousness clearly explain their own philosophical views on metaphysics. That's why I end my post "Consciousness: Science versus Philosophy" with an endorsement of science to study consciousness and a warning to not waste your time studying too much philosophy of mind.
I would simply suggest that you read kant ;)
I read a good amount of his work already but if there's a point he made you're thinking I'm missing, feel free to explain.
For me when it comes to studying consciousness I actually found it extremely rewarding to study the work of Charles Darwin, Frans de Waal, and Todd Feinberg + John Mallatt.
To me I like the naturalistic physicalist approach to explaining consciousness because it best answers my questions about my own mental life.
When I want to understand my own consciousness I want to know what is happening to me when I am hearing a symphony, or seeing a sunset, or tasting coffee, which gives rise to my experiences. I want to know why my mental experiences go away when I go to sleep and why they come back when I wake up.
All of that can be explained by looking at my physical body and the processes my own body is going through which generates and sustains those mental experiences.
I've never thought that describing how my eye takes in light and my brain processes that information is somehow inadequate to explaining my visual consciousness.
I do not feel the need to add some extra idealist or panpsychist fundamental mind in order to explain the emergence of my conscious experiences from my own body.
What I actually find extremely unscientific and unrewarding is attributing a fundamental mind that has absolutely no connection to my physical body to explain my own conscious experience.
That's another reason physicalism is different than idealism. Physicalism started with the evidence and build an explanation out of it. Idealism/Panpsychism begin with a predetermined explanation and just claims the evidence is compatible with it without any explanation of how.
So what do you think about his transcendental idealism as well as the indirect realism that emerged from his critique? Because I think that kind of shows that science definitely does not equal physicalism. This is especially a problem when you look at the phenomena, Noumena distinction for naive physicalism imo (wrote about that in my last piece on idealism). Again I am not an idealist or panpsychist myself. All I am saying is that they should not be categorically off limits for doing research. Because science definitely doesn't lead to physicalism. Again physicalism is a metaphysical theory, science cannot show what reality truly is in itself (which is why I pointed to Kant).
I just think we come at it from very different perspectives...
1st
For Kant’s challenges, my understanding is that his point was that we do not experience nature as it exists but instead are aware of it through our own mental representations. That makes a lot of sense to me given evolution and Frans De Waal's description of an Evolutionary Umwelt.
Did you ever read the "Qualia" post of mine I shared with you a while ago?
In it I talk about the range of human conscious experience and its limitations. Like how a bat can hear at higher frequencies than a human and an elephant could hear lower frequencies than we can. I talk about how a pigeon can see different wavelengths of light than we can because the have cone receptors we lack. And if you consider speed there are things too slow for us to visually observe like grass growing or way too fast to see like a mantis shrimp striking its prey. So our consciousness is constrained by our biology and that is a good point to know from Kant.
But science relies on tools more than just human observation and I thank that gives us knowledge of nature as it exists rather than through our perspective. Like we don't see atoms or electrons or quarks and without using tools to study matter beyond just human perspective we would have no idea about any of that. Radioactive decay is something humankind would never find out about through our own biological perspective. So we do learn through empiricism about nature as it truly exists, at least in my perspective.
2nd
Another important difference in our views is that I don't think any scientist starts doing science by claiming that all of nature must be physical and therefore we can only understand our observations through that lens.
I don't take physicalism to be an a priori metaphysical position. To me, science begins with a metaphysical commitment to empiricism. Physicalism is the result of empirical science in my opinion.
At the start of the scientific enlightenment there were dualists like Rene Descartes who would just assert that humans are made up of our physical body plus a completely separate immaterial soul disconnected from our physical body.
Scientists took an alternative approach of just looking at what we are made of and not adding anything extra that is not observed.
Using tools like microscopes we found that we are made up of cells, then using stronger microscopes we saw that those cells were made up of organelles. Science learned through observation that organelles are made up of molecules and molecules are made up of atoms.
So science discovered the physical basis of humans, and all living things as a physical thing called an atom. Scientists like Dimitri Mendeleev created the periodic table based on that type of information. The periodic table represents what we know about the atomic basis of all the planets and stars and everything in the universe including us.
So the atomic, physical basis of us and our universe is a discovery of science.
Anyways, this turned out to be a very long comment. Hope it wasn't too rough to get through!
I don't think the world is waiting for another philosophy of mind.
It is about our reality.
Triadic Realism is a philosophical position that fundamentally differs from conventional philosophy of mind.
It is the sum of 3 realities:
1. Subjective
2. Scientific
3. Creative
* It does not implicitely smuggle in concnsciousnes
* It is complete
* It is testable
Ask your favorite LLM
Just drop the ism's. All of them. Then start with finding any one single philosophy anywhere that actually represents the fundamental principles of Nature. Model from that. Throw out all the old shit. It never worked in the first place. Look at how fucked up people are these days. Science is the cause, not the solution.
I read the article. I get where you're coming from. Great. But Tim, you're trying to put lipstick on a pig. A dress on a turd. Really; get rid of the ism's.