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Panpsychism If conscious experience arises wherever there is information, a “difference that makes a difference”, then conscious experience is in a lot of places where we would not intuitively expect it to be. Does this constitute a reductio ad absurdam to Chalmers’ view? He approaches the difficulty as follows (293): There are two ways that a support of the information-based approach might react to this situation. The first and most obvious is to look for further constraints on the kind of information that is relevant to experience. Not just any physically realised information space is associated with experience, but only those with certain properties… The alternative… is to bite the bullet and accept that all information is associated with experience. If so, then it is not just information that is ubiquitous. Experience is ubiquitous too. In an endearingly-titled section, “What is it like to be a thermostat?” he describes the potential consequences of the second alternative (293): Certainly it will not be very interesting to be a thermostat. The information processing is so simple that we should expect the corresponding phenomenal states to be equally simple. There will be three primitively different phenomenal states, with no further structure. Discussion continues (293–301) and Chalmers avoids adopting a fixed position on the matter. The panpsychist consequences of his information theory may make it highly implau- sible to many readers but, like many other positions on the mind–body problem, panpsychism is irrefutable. Our lack of epistemic access to ‘other minds’ means that we will never be able to conclusively tell whether it is like anything to be a thermostat, a rock, or a hurri- cane. An objection along the lines of “but we have no reason to believe that rocks are conscious” can be assuaged by replying that the only reason we have to believe that people are conscious is that each of us is one of them, so we infer from our own predicament of sen- tience to that of others. Once again, a high price is to be paid in aesthetic terms but the pos- sibility remains coherent. 40
Phenomenological Representation The attentive reader will take note that, as explicated so far, Chalmers is yet to deal with the central problem discussed earlier, of how to represent subjective feels in a manner al- lowing them to be matched with physical events. To extend Chalmers’ terminology, even if we solve his hard problem of explaining how consciousness arises, we still have an “even harder problem” – how to match the contents of consciousness with the information spaces from which it supposedly arises. At the very end of the section discussing his prototheory (303–310), Chalmers addresses the issue (303–4): We have something over and above a pure information space. Phenomenal properties have an intrinsic nature, one that is not exhausted by their location in an information space, and it seems that a purely information view of the world leaves no room for these intrinsic qualities. He then goes on to make some suggestions about how phenomenology might be tied to intrinsic properties of matter itself. Perhaps (305) the information spaces required by physics are themselves grounded in phenomenal or protophenomenal properties. Each instantiation of such an information space is in fact a phenomenal (or protophenomenal) realisation. Every time a feature such as mass and charge is realised, there is an intrinsic property behind it… The ontology that this leads to might truly be called a double-aspect ontology. Physics requires information states but cares only about their rela- tions… phenomenology requires information states, but cares only about the intrinsic nature… Experience is information from the inside; physics is information from the outside. Aside from noting just how speculative the book is now becoming, we might be able to take the proposition seriously. However, this still does not allay the theologians’ misgivings. Chalmers wants to suggest that mass and charge might be very closely tied to some sort of intrinsic phenomenal properties but Swinburne would retort: How on earth are you going to get from simple physical properties to the full range of human conscious experiences? How are you going to explicate an isomorphism between, say, an aggregate of electron spin and 41
Page 1 and 2: Acknowledgements TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page 3 and 4: The Argument from Consciousness In
Page 5 and 6: chips which was capable of behaving
Page 7 and 8: the decisions made within minds exe
Page 9 and 10: ful to think of a logically possibl
Page 11 and 12: entity, but it doesn’t explain re
Page 13 and 14: scription. As Cottrell says, “one
Page 15 and 16: nothing is proven about whatever ac
Page 17 and 18: THE ARGUMENT FOR SCIENTIFIC INEXPLI
Page 19 and 20: the basic physical laws are statist
Page 21 and 22: The Problem of Complexity Consider
Page 23 and 24: Therefore God? If, for argument’s
Page 25 and 26: point will have greater force. More
Page 27 and 28: moved, so that the transplant takes
Page 29 and 30: This is similar to Chalmers’ argu
Page 31 and 32: tion. Each of these objections has
Page 33 and 34: CHALMERS’ THEORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Page 35 and 36: sciousness’) is not logically sup
Page 37 and 38: Information (in the actual world) h
Page 39: We can say that Chalmers wrote a bo
Page 43 and 44: Reconsidering the Alternatives CONC
Page 45 and 46: sense 14 , the act of human observa
Page 47 and 48: there any way in which conceptual c
Page 49 and 50: REFERENCES Adams, R. M. (1987) ‘F

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