Reasons to doubt that suffering is ontologically prevalent

It is sometimes claimed that we cannot know whether suffering is ontologically prevalent — for example, we cannot rule out that suffering might exist in microorganisms such as bacteria, or even in the simplest physical processes. Relatedly, it has been argued that we cannot trust common-sense views and intuitions regarding the physical basis of suffering.

I agree with the spirit of these arguments, in that I think it is true that we cannot definitively rule out that suffering might exist in bacteria or fundamental physics, and I agree that we have good reasons to doubt common-sense intuitions about the nature of suffering. Nevertheless, I think discussions of expansive views of the ontological prevalence of suffering often present a somewhat unbalanced and, in my view, overly agnostic view of the physical basis of suffering. (By “expansive views”, I do not refer to views that hold that, say, insects are sentient, but rather views that hold that suffering exists in considerably simpler systems, such as in bacteria or fundamental physics.)

While we cannot definitively rule out that suffering might be ontologically prevalent, I do think that we have strong reasons to doubt it, as well as to doubt the practical importance of this possibility. My goal in this post is to present some of these reasons.

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Counterexamples: People who do not experience pain or suffering

One argument against the notion that suffering is ontologically prevalent is that we seem to have counterexamples in people who do not experience pain or suffering. For example, various genetic conditions seemingly lead to a complete absence of pain and/or suffering. This, I submit, has significant implications for our views of the ontological prevalence (or non-prevalence) of suffering.

After all, the brains of these individuals include countless subatomic particles, basic biological processes, diverse instances of information processing, and so on, suggesting that none of these are in themselves sufficient to generate pain or suffering.

One might object that the brains of such people could be experiencing suffering — perhaps even intense suffering — that these people are just not able to consciously access. Yet even if we were to grant this claim, it does not change the basic argument that generic processes at the level of subatomic particles, basic biology, etc. do not seem sufficient to create suffering. For the processes that these people do consciously access presumably still entail at least some (indeed probably countless) subatomic particles, basic biological processes, electrochemical signals, different types of biological cells, diverse instances of information processing, and so on. This gives us reason to doubt all views that see suffering as an inherent or generic feature of processes at any of these (quite many) respective levels.

Of course, this argument is not limited to people who are congenitally unable to experience suffering; it applies to anyone who is just momentarily free from noticeable — let alone significant — pain or suffering. Any experiential moment that is free from significant suffering is meaningful evidence against highly expansive views of the ontological prevalence of significant suffering.

Our emerging understanding of pain and suffering

Another argument against expansive views of the prevalence of suffering is that our modern understanding of the biology of suffering gives us reason to doubt such views. That is, we have gained an increasingly refined understanding of the evolutionary, genetic, and neurobiological bases of pain and suffering, and the picture that emerges is that suffering is a complex phenomenon associated with specific genes and neural structures (as exemplified by the above-mentioned genetic conditions that knock out pain and/or suffering).

To be sure, the fact that suffering is associated with specific genes and neural structures in animals does not imply that suffering cannot be created in other ways in other systems. It does, however, suggest that suffering is unlikely to be found in simple systems that do not have remote analogues of these specific structures (since we otherwise should expect suffering to be associated with a much wider range structures and processes, not such an intricate and narrowly delineated set).

By analogy, consider the experience of wanting to go to a Taylor Swift concert so as to share the event with your Instagram followers. Do we have reason to believe that fundamental particles such as electrons, or microorganisms such as bacteria, might have such experiences? To go a step further, do we have reason to be agnostic as to whether electrons or bacteria might have such experiences?

These questions may seem too silly to merit contemplation. After all, we know that having a conscious desire to go to a concert for the purpose of online sharing requires rather advanced cognitive abilities that, at least in our case, are associated with extremely complex structures in the brain — not to mention that it requires an understanding of a larger cultural context that is far removed from the everyday concerns of electrons and bacteria. But the question is why we would see the case of suffering as being so different.

Of course, one might object that this is a bad analogy, since the experience described above is far more narrowly specified than is suffering as a general class of experience. I would agree that the experience described above is far more specific and unusual, but I still think the basic point of the analogy holds, in that our understanding is that suffering likewise rests on rather complex and specific structures (when it occurs in animal brains) — we might just not intuitively appreciate how complex and distinctive these structures are in the case of suffering, as opposed to in the Swift experience.

It seems inconsistent to allow ourselves to apply our deeper understanding of the Swift experience to strongly downgrade our credence in electron- or bacteria-level Swift experiences, while not allowing our deeper understanding of pain and suffering to strongly downgrade our credence in electron- or bacteria-level pain and suffering, even if the latter downgrade should be comparatively weaker (given the lower level of specificity of this broader class of experiences).

Practical relevance

It is worth stressing that, in the context of our priorities, the question is not whether we can rule out suffering in simple systems like electrons or bacteria. Rather, the question is whether the all-things-considered probability and weight of such hypothetical suffering is sufficiently large for it to merit any meaningful priority relative to other forms of suffering.

For example, one may hold a lexical view according to which no amount of putative “micro-discomfort” that we might ascribe to electrons or bacteria can ever be collectively worse than a single instance of extreme suffering. Likewise, even if one does not hold a strictly lexical view in theory, one might still hold that the probability of suffering in simple systems is so low that, relative to the expected prevalence of other kinds of suffering, it is so strongly dominated so as to merit practically no priority by comparison (cf. “Lexical priority to extreme suffering — in practice”).

After all, the risk of suffering in simple systems would not only have to be held up against the suffering of all currently existing animals on Earth, but also against the risk of worst-case outcomes that involve astronomical numbers of overtly tormented beings. In this broader perspective, it seems reasonable to believe that the risk of suffering in simple systems is massively dwarfed by the risk of such astronomical worst-case outcomes, partly because the latter risk seems considerably less speculative, and because it seems far more likely to involve the worst instances of suffering.

Relatedly, just as we should be open to considering the possibility of suffering in simple systems such as bacteria, it seems that we should also be open to the possibility that spending a lot of time contemplating this issue — and not least trying to raise concern for it — might be an enormous opportunity cost that will overall increase extreme suffering in the future (e.g. because it distracts people from more important issues, or because it pushes people toward dismissing suffering reducers as absurd or crazy).

To be clear, I am not saying that contemplating this issue in fact is such an opportunity cost. My point is simply that it is important not to treat highly speculative possibilities in a manner that is too one-sided, such that we make one speculative possibility disproportionately salient (e.g. there might be a lot of suffering in microorganisms or in fundamental physics), while neglecting to consider other speculative possibilities that may in some sense “balance out” the former (e.g. that prioritizing the risk of suffering in simple systems significantly increases extreme suffering).

In more general terms, it can be misleading to consider Pascallian wagers if we do not also consider their respective “counter-Pascallian” wagers. For example, what if believing in God actually overall increases the probability of you experiencing eternal suffering, such as by marginally increasing the probability that future people will create infinite universes that contain infinitely many versions of you that get tortured for life?

In this way, our view of Pascal’s wager may change drastically when we go beyond its original one-sided framing and consider a broader range of possibilities, and the same applies to Pascallian wagers relating to the purported suffering of simple entities like bacteria or electrons. When we consider a broader range of speculative hypotheses, it is hardly clear whether we should overall give more or less consideration to such simple entities than we currently do, at least when compared to how much consideration and priority we give to other forms of suffering.

November 10, 2023

Does digital or “traditional” sentience dominate in expectation?

My aim in this post is to critique two opposite positions that I think are both mistaken, or which at least tend to be endorsed with too much confidence.

The first position is that the vast majority of future sentient beings will, in expectation, be digital, meaning that they will be “implemented” in digital computers.

The second position is in some sense a rejection of the first one. Based on a skepticism of the possibility of digital sentience, this position holds that future sentience will not be artificial, but instead be “traditionally” biological — that is, most future sentient beings will, in expectation, be biological beings roughly as we know them today.

I think the main problem with this dichotomy of positions is that it leaves out a reasonable third option, which is that most future beings will be artificial but not necessarily digital.

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Reasons to doubt that digital sentience dominates in expectation

One can roughly identify two classes of reasons to doubt that most future sentient beings will be digital.

First, there are object-level arguments against the possibility of digital sentience. For example, based on his physicalist view of consciousness, David Pearce argues that the discrete and disconnected bits of a digital computer cannot, if they remain discrete and disconnected, join together into a unified state of sentience. They can at most, Pearce argues, be “micro-experiential pixels”.

Second, regardless of whether one believes in the possibility of digital sentience, the future dominance of digital sentience can be doubted on the grounds that it is a fairly strong and specific claim. After all, even if digital sentience is perfectly possible, it by no means follows that future sentient beings will necessarily converge toward being digital.

In other words, the digital dominance position makes strong assumptions about the most prevalent forms of sentient computation in the future, and it seems that there is a fairly large space of possibilities that does not imply digital dominance, such as (a future predominance of) non-digital neuron-based computers, non-digital neuron-inspired computers, and various kinds of quantum computers that have yet to be invented.

When one takes these arguments into account, it at least seems quite uncertain whether digital sentience dominates in expectation, even if we grant that artificial sentience does.

Reasons to doubt that “traditional” biological sentience dominates in expectation

A reason to doubt that “traditional” sentience dominates is that, whatever one’s theory of sentience, it seems likely that sentience can be created artificially — i.e. in a way that we would deem artificial. (An example might be further developed and engineered versions of brain organoids.) Specifically, regardless of which physical processes or mechanisms we take to be critical to sentience, those processes or mechanisms can most likely be replicated in other systems than just live biological animals as we know them.

If we combine this premise with an assumption of continued technological evolution (which likely holds true in the future scenarios that contain the largest numbers of sentient beings), it overall seems doubtful that the majority of future beings will, in expectation, be “traditional” biological organisms — especially when we consider the prospect of large futures that involve space colonization.

More broadly, we have reason to doubt the “traditional” biological dominance position for the same reason that we have reason to doubt the digital dominance position, namely that the position entails a rather strong and specific claim along the lines that: “this particular class of sentient being is most numerous in expectation”. And, as in the case of digital dominance, it seems that there are many plausible ways in which this could turn out to be wrong, such as due to neuron-inspired or other yet-to-be-invented artificial systems that could become both sentient and prevalent.

Why does this matter?

Whether artificial sentience dominates in expectation plausibly matters for our priorities (though it is unclear how much exactly, since some of our most robust strategies for reducing suffering are probably worth pursuing in roughly the same form regardless). Yet those who take artificial sentience seriously might adopt suboptimal priorities and communication strategies if they primarily focus on digital sentience in particular.

At the level of priorities, they might restrict their focus to an overly narrow set of potentially sentient systems, and perhaps neglect the great majority of future suffering as a result. At the level of communication, they might needlessly hamper their efforts to raise concern for artificial sentience by mostly framing the issue in terms of digital sentience. This framing might lead people who are skeptical of digital sentience to mistakenly dismiss the broader issue of artificial sentience.

Similar points apply to those who believe that “traditional” biological sentience dominates in expectation: they, too, might restrict their focus to an overly narrow set of systems, and thereby neglect to consider a wide range of scenarios that may intuitively seem like science fiction, yet which nevertheless deserve serious consideration on reflection (e.g. scenarios that involve a large-scale spread of suffering due to space colonization).

In summary, there are reasons to doubt both the digital dominance position and the “traditional” biological dominance position. Moreover, it seems that there is something to be gained by not using the narrow term “digital sentience” to refer to the broader category of “artificial sentience”, and by being clear about just how much broader this latter category is.

November 8, 2023

Why I don’t prioritize consciousness research

For altruists trying to reduce suffering, there is much to be said in favor of gaining a better understanding of consciousness. Not only may it lead to therapies that can mitigate suffering in the near term, but it may also help us in our large-scale prioritization efforts. For instance, clarifying which beings can feel pain is important for determining which causes and interventions we should be working on to best reduce suffering.

These points notwithstanding, my own view is that advancing consciousness research is not among the best uses of marginal resources for those seeking to reduce suffering. My aim in this post is to briefly explain why I hold this view.

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Reason I: Scientific progress seems less contingent than other important endeavors

Scientific discoveries generally seem quite convergent, so much so that the same discovery is often made independently at roughly the same time (cf. examples of “multiple discovery”). This is not surprising: if we are trying to uncover an underlying truth — as per the standard story of science — we should expect our truth-seeking efforts to eventually converge upon the best explanation, provided that our hypotheses can be tested.

This is not to say that there is no contingency whatsoever in science, which there surely is — after all, the same discovery can be formalized in quite different ways (famous examples include the competing calculus notations of Newton and Leibniz, as well as distinct yet roughly equivalent formalisms of quantum mechanics). But the level of contingency in science still seems considerably lower than the level of contingency found in other domains, such as when it comes to which values people hold or what political frameworks they embrace.

To be clear, it is not that values and political frameworks are purely contingent either, as there is no doubt some level of convergence in these respects as well. Yet the convergence still seems significantly lower (and the contingency higher). For example, compare two of the most important events in the early 20th century in these respective domains: the formulation of the general theory of relativity (1915) and the communist revolution in Russia (roughly 1917-1922). While the formulation of the theory of general relativity did involve some contingency, particularly in terms of who and when, it seems extremely likely that the same theory would eventually have been formulated anyway (after all, many of Einstein’s other discoveries were made independently, roughly at the same time).

In comparison, the outcome of the Russian Revolution appears to have been far more contingent, and it seems that greater foreign intervention (as well as other factors) could easily have altered the outcome of the Russian Civil War, and thereby changed the course of history quite substantially.

This greater contingency of values and political systems compared to that of scientific progress suggests that we can generally make a greater counterfactual difference by focusing on the former, other things being equal.

Reason II: Consciousness research seems less neglected than other important endeavors

Besides contingency, it seems that there is a strong neglectedness case in favor of prioritizing the promotion of better values and political frameworks over the advancement of consciousness research.

After all, there are already many academic research centers that focus on consciousness research. By contrast, there is not a single academic research center that focuses primarily on the impartial reduction of suffering (e.g. at the level of values and political frameworks). To be sure, there is a lot of academic work that is relevant to the reduction of suffering, yet only a tiny fraction of this work adopts a comprehensive perspective that includes the suffering of all sentient beings across all time; and virtually none of it seeks to clarify optimal priorities relative to that perspective. Such impartial work seems exceedingly rare.

This difference in neglectedness likewise suggests that it is more effective to promote values and political frameworks that aim to reduce the suffering of all sentient beings — as well as to improve our strategic insights into effective suffering reduction — than to push for a better scientific understanding of consciousness.

Objection: The best consciousness research is also neglected

One might object that certain promising approaches to consciousness research (that we could support) are also extremely neglected, even if the larger field of consciousness research is not. Yet granting that this is true, I still think work on values and political frameworks (of the kind alluded to above) will be more neglected overall, considering the greater convergence of science compared to values and politics.

That is, the point regarding scientific convergence suggests that uniquely promising approaches to understanding consciousness are likely to be discovered eventually. Or at least it suggests that these promising approaches will be significantly less neglected than will efforts to promote values and political systems centered on effective suffering reduction for all sentient beings.

Reason III: Prioritizing the fundamental bottleneck — the willingness problem

Perhaps the greatest bottleneck to effective suffering reduction is humanity’s lack of willingness to this end. While most people may embrace ideals that give significant weight to the reduction of suffering in theory, the reality is that most of us tend to give relatively little priority to the reduction of suffering in terms of our revealed preferences and our willingness to pay for the avoidance of suffering (e.g. in our consumption choices).

In particular, there are various reasons to think that our (un)willingness to reduce suffering is a bigger bottleneck than is our (lack of) understanding of consciousness. For example, if we look at what are arguably the two biggest sources of suffering in the world today — factory farming and wild-animal suffering — it seems that the main bottleneck to human progress on both of these problems is a lack of willingness to reduce suffering, whereas a greater knowledge of consciousness does not appear to be a key bottleneck. After all, most people in the US already report that they believe many insects to be sentient, and a majority likewise agree that farmed animals have roughly the same ability to experience pain as humans. Beliefs about animal sentience per se thus do not appear to be a main bottleneck, as opposed to speciesist attitudes and institutions that disregard non-human suffering.

In general, it seems to me that the willingness problem is best tackled by direct attempts to address it, such as by promoting greater concern for suffering, by reducing the gap between our noble ideals and our often less than noble behavior, and by advancing institutions that reflect impartial concern for suffering to a greater extent. While a better understanding of consciousness may be helpful with respect to the willingness problem, it still seems unlikely to me that consciousness research is among the very best ways to address it.

Reason IV: A better understanding of consciousness might enable deliberate harm

A final reason to prioritize other pursuits over consciousness research is that a better understanding of consciousness comes with significant risks. That is, while a better understanding of consciousness would allow benevolent agents to reduce suffering, it may likewise allow malevolent agents to increase suffering.

This risk is yet another reason why it seems safer and more beneficial to focus directly on the willingness problem and the related problem of keeping malevolent agents out of power — problems that we have by no means found solutions to, and which we are not guaranteed to find solutions to in the future. Indeed, given how serious these problems are, and how little control we have with regard to risks of malevolent individuals in power — especially in autocratic states — it is worth being cautious about developing tools and insights that can potentially increase humanity’s ability to cause harm.

Objection: Consciousness research is the best way to address these problems

One might argue that consciousness research is ultimately the best way to address both the willingness problem and the risk of malevolent agents in power, or that it is the best way to solve at least one of those problems. Yet this seems doubtful to me, and like somewhat of a suspicious convergence. Given the vast range of possible interventions we could pursue to address these problems, we should be a priori skeptical of any intervention that we may propose as the best one, particularly when the path to impact is highly indirect.

Objection: We should be optimistic about solving these problems

Another argument in favor of consciousness research might be that we have reason to be optimistic about solving both the willingness problem and the malevolence problem, since the nature of selection pressure is about to change. Thanks to modern technological tools, benevolent agents will soon be able to design the world with greater foresight. We will deliberately choose genes and institutions to ensure that benevolence becomes realized to an ever greater extent, and in effect practically solve both the willingness problem and the malevolence problem.

But this argument seems to overlook two things. First, there is no guarantee that most humans will make actively benevolent choices, even if their choices will not be outright malevolent either. Most people may continue to optimize for things other than impartial benevolence, such as personal status and prestige, and they may continue to show relatively little concern for non-human beings.

Second, and perhaps more worryingly, modern technologies that enable intelligent foresight and deliberation for benevolent agents could be just as empowering for malevolent agents. The arms race between cooperators and exploiters is an ancient one, and I think we have strong reasons to doubt that this arms race will disappear in the next few decades or centuries. On the contrary, I believe we have good grounds to expect this arms race to intensify, which to my mind is all the more reason to focus directly on reducing the risks posed by malevolent agents, and to promote norms and institutions that favor cooperation. And again, I am skeptical that consciousness research is among the best ways to achieve these aims, even if it might be beneficial overall.

Acknowledgments

For their comments, I thank Tobias Baumann, Winston Oswald-Drummond, and Jacob Shwartz-Lucas.

July 7, 2022

Consciousness: Orthogonal or Crucial?

The following is an excerpt from my book Reflections on Intelligence (2016/2024).

A question that is often considered open, sometimes even irrelevant, when it comes to “AGIs” and “superintelligences” is whether such entities would be conscious. Here is Nick Bostrom expressing such a sentiment:

By a “superintelligence” we mean an intellect that is much smarter than the best human brains in practically every field, including scientific creativity, general wisdom and social skills. This definition leaves open how the superintelligence is implemented: it could be a digital computer, an ensemble of networked computers, cultured cortical tissue or what have you. It also leaves open whether the superintelligence is conscious and has subjective experiences. (Bostrom, 2012, “Definition of ‘superintelligence’”)

Yet this is hardly true. If a system is “more capable than the best human brains in practically every field, including scientific creativity, general wisdom, and social skills”, the question of consciousness is highly relevant. Consciousness is integral to much of what we do and excel at, and thus if an entity is not conscious, it cannot outperform the best humans “in practically every field”, especially not in “general wisdom” and “scientific creativity”. Let us look at these in turn.

General Wisdom

A core aspect of “general wisdom” is to be wise about ethical issues. Yet being wise about ethical issues requires that one can consider and evaluate questions like the following in an informed manner:

Is there anything about the experience of suffering that makes its reduction a moral priority
Does anything about the experience of suffering justify the claim that reducing suffering has greater moral priority than increasing happiness (for the already happy)?
Is there anything about states of extreme suffering that make their reduction an overriding moral priority?

It seems that one would have to be conscious in order to explore and answer such questions in an informed way. That is, one would have to know what such experiences are like in order to understand their experiential properties and significance. Knowing what a term like “suffering” refers to — i.e. knowing what actual experiences of suffering are like — is thus crucial for informed ethical reflection.

The same point holds true about other areas of philosophy that bear on wisdom, such as the philosophy of mind: without knowing what it is like to have a conscious mind, one cannot contribute much to the discussion about what it is like to have one and to the exploration of different modes of consciousness. Indeed, an unconscious entity has no genuine understanding about what the issue of consciousness is even about in the first place (Pearce, 2012a; 2012b).

So both in ethics and in the philosophy of mind, an unconscious entity would be less than clueless about many of the deepest questions at hand. If an entity not only fails to surpass humans in these areas, but fails to even have the slightest clue about what we are talking about, it hardly surpasses the best humans in practically every field. After all, questions about the phenomenology of consciousness are also relevant to many other fields, including psychology, epistemology, and ontology.

In short, experiencing and reasoning about consciousness is a key part of “human abilities”, and hence an entity that is unable to do this cannot be claimed to outperform humans in the most important, much less all, human abilities (see also Pearce, 2012a; 2012b).

Scientific Creativity

Another ability mentioned above that an unconscious entity could supposedly outdo humans at is scientific creativity. Yet scientific creativity must relate to all fields of knowledge, including the science of the conscious mind itself. This is also a part of the natural world, and a most relevant one at that.

Experiencing and accurately reporting what a given state of consciousness is like is essential for the science of mind, yet an unconscious entity obviously cannot do such a thing, as there is no experience it can report from. It cannot display any genuine scientific creativity, or even produce mere observations, in the direct exploration of consciousness.

August 8, 2020

On Insects and Lexicality

“Their experiences may be more simple than ours, but are they less intense? Perhaps a caterpillar’s primitive pain when squashed is greater than our more sophisticated sufferings.”

— Richard Ryder, Painism: A Modern Morality, p. 64.

Many people, myself included, find it plausible that suffering of a certain intensity, such as torture, carries greater moral significance than any amount of mild suffering. One may be tempted to think that views of this kind imply we should primarily prioritize the beings most likely to experience these “lexically worse” states of suffering (LWS) — presumably beings with large brains.* By extension, one may think such views will generally imply little priority to beings with small, less complex brains, such as insects. (Which is probably also a view we would intuitively like to embrace, given the inconvenience of the alternative.)

Yet while perhaps intuitive, I do not think this conclusion follows. The main argument against it, in my view, is that we should maintain a non-trivial probability that beings with small brains, such as insects, indeed can experience LWS (regardless of how we define these states). After all, on what grounds can we confidently maintain they cannot?

And if we then assume an expected value framework, and multiply the large number of insects by a non-trivial probability of them being able to experience LWS, we find that, in terms of presently existing beings, the largest amount of LWS in expectation may well be found in small beings such as insects.

* It should be noted in this context, though, that many humans ostensibly cannot feel (at least physical) pain, whereas many beings with smaller brains show every sign of having this capacity, which suggests brain size is a poor proxy for the ability to experience pain, let alone the ability to experience LWS, and that genetic variation in certain pain-modulating genes may well be a more important factor.

More literature

On insects:

The Importance of Insect Suffering
Reducing Suffering Amongst Invertebrates Such As Insects
Do Bugs Feel Pain?
How to Avoid Hurting Insects
The Moral Importance of Invertebrates Such as Insects

On Lexicality:

Value Lexicality
Clarifying lexical thresholds
Many-valued logic as a reply to sequence arguments in value theory
Lexicality between mild discomfort and unbearable suffering: A variety of possible views
Lexical priority to extreme suffering — in practice

August 27, 2019

Physics Is Also Qualia

In this post, I seek to clarify what I consider to be some common confusions about consciousness and “physics” stemming from a failure to distinguish clearly between ontological and epistemological senses of “physics”.

Clarifying Terms

Two senses of the word “physics” are worth distinguishing. There is physics in an ontological sense: roughly speaking, the spatio-temporal(-seeming) world that in many ways conforms well to our best physical theories. And then there is physics in an epistemological sense: a certain class of models we have of this world, the science of physics.

“Physics” in this latter, epistemological sense can be further divided into 1) the physical models we have in our minds, versus 2) the models we have external to our minds, such as in our physics textbooks and computer simulations. Yet it is worth noting that, to the extent we ourselves have any knowledge of the models in our books and simulations, we only have this knowledge by representing it in our minds. Thus, ultimately, all the knowledge of physical models we have, as subjects, is knowledge of the first kind: as appearances in our minds.*

In light of these very different senses of the term “physics”, it is clear that the claim that “physics is also qualia” can be understood in two very different ways: 1) in the sense that the physical world, in the ontological sense, is qualia, or “phenomenal”, and 2) that our models of physics are qualia, i.e. that our models of physics are certain patterns of consciousness. The first of these two claims is surely the most controversial one, and I shall not defend it here; I explore it here and here.

Instead, I shall here focus on the latter claim. My aim is not really to defend it, as I already briefly did that above: all the knowledge of physics we have, as subjects, ultimately appears as experiential patterns in our minds. (Although talk of the phenomenology of, say, operations in Hilbert spaces admittedly is rare.) I take this to be obvious, and hit an impasse with anyone who disagrees. My aim here is rather to clarify some confusions that arise due to a lack of clarity about this, and due to conflations of the two senses of “physics” described above.

The Problem of Reduction: Epistemological or Ontological?

I find it worth quoting the following excerpt from a Big Think interview with Sam Harris. Not because there is anything atypical about what Harris says, but rather because I think he here clearly illustrates the prevailing lack of clarity about the distinction between epistemology and ontology in relation to “the physical”.

If there’s an experiential internal qualitative dimension to any physical system then that is consciousness. And we can’t reduce the experiential side to talk of information processing and neurotransmitters and states of the brain […]. Someone like Francis Crick said famously you’re nothing but a pack of neurons. And that misses the fact that half of the reality we’re talking about is the qualitative experiential side. So when you’re trying to study human consciousness, for instance, by looking at states of the brain, all you can do is correlate experiential changes with changes in brain states. But no matter how tight these correlations become that never gives you license to throw out the first person experiential side. That would be analogous to saying that if you just flipped a coin long enough you would realize it had only one side. And now it’s true you can be committed to talking about just one side. You can say that heads being up is just a case of tails being down. But that doesn’t actually reduce one side of reality to the other.

Especially worth resting on here is the statement “half of the reality we’re talking about is the qualitative experiential side.” Yet is this “half of reality” an “ontological half” or an “epistemological half”? That is, is there a half of reality out there that is part phenomenal, and part “non-phenomenal” — perhaps “inertly physical”? Or are we rather talking about two different phenomenal descriptions of the same thing, respectively 1) physico-mathematical models of the mind-brain (and these models, again, are also qualia, i.e. patterns of consciousness), and 2) all other phenomenal descriptions, i.e. those drawing on the countless other experiential modalities we can currently conceive of — emotions, sounds, colors, etc. — as well as those we can’t? I suggest we are really talking about two different descriptions of the same thing.

A similar question can be raised in relation to Harris’ claim that we cannot “reduce one side of reality to the other.” Is the reduction in question, or rather failure of reduction, an ontological or an epistemological one? If it is ontological, then it is unclear what this means. Is it that one side of reality cannot “be” the other? This does not appear to be Harris’ view, even if he does tacitly buy into ontologically distinct sides (as opposed to descriptions) of reality in the first place.

Yet if the failure of reduction is epistemological, then there is in fact little unusual about it, as failures of epistemological reduction, or reductions from one model to another, are found everywhere in science. In the abstract sciences, for example, one axiomatic system does not necessarily reduce to another; indeed, we can readily create different axiomatic systems that not only fail to reduce to each other yet which actively contradict each other. And hence we cannot derive all of mathematics, broadly construed, from a single axiomatic system.

Similarly, in the empirical sciences, economics does not “reduce to” quantum physics. One may object that economics does reduce to quantum physics in principle, yet it should then be noted that 1) the term “in principle” does an enormous amount of work here, arguably about as much as it would have to do in the claim that “quantum physics can explain consciousness in principle” — after all, physics and economics invoke very different models and experiential modalities (economic theories are often qualitative in nature, and some prominent economists have even argued they are primarily so). And 2) a serious case can be made against the claim that even all the basic laws found in chemistry, the closest neighbor of physics, can be derived from fundamental physical theories, even in principle (see e.g. Berofsky, 2012, chap. 8). This case does not rest on there being something mysterious going on between our transition from theories of physics to theories of chemistry, nor that new fundamental forces are implicated, but merely that our models in these respective fields contain elements not reducible, even in principle, to our models in other areas.

Thus, at the level of our minds, we can clearly construct many different mental models which we cannot reduce to each other, even in principle. Yet this merely says something about our models and epistemology. It hardly comprises a deep metaphysical mystery.

Denying the Reality of Consciousness

The fact that the world conforms, at least roughly, to description in “physical” terms seems to have led some people to deny that consciousness in general exists. Yet this, I submit, is a fallacy: the fact that we can model the world in one set of terms which describe certain of its properties does not imply that we cannot describe it in another set of terms that describe other properties truly there as well, even if we cannot derive one from the other.

By analogy, consider again physics and economics: we can take the exact same object of study — say, a human society — and describe aspects of it in physical terms (with models of thermodynamics, classical mechanics, electrodynamics, etc.), yet we cannot from any such description or set of descriptions meaningfully derive a description of the economics of this society. It would clearly be a fallacy to suggest that this implies facts of economics cannot exist.

Again, I think the confusion derives from conflating epistemology with ontology: “physics”, in the epistemological sense of “descriptions of the world in physico-mathematical terms”, appears to encompass “everything out there”, and hence, the reasoning goes, nothing else can exist out there. Of course, in one sense, this is true: if a description in physico-mathematical terms exhaustively describes everything out there, then there is indeed nothing more to be said about it — in physico-mathematical terms. Yet this says nothing about the properties of what is out there in other terms, as illustrated by the economics example above. (Another reason some people seem to deny the reality of consciousness, distinct from conflation of the epistemological and the ontological, is “denial due to fuzziness”, which I have addressed here.)

This relates, I think, to the fundamental Kantian insight on epistemology: we never experience the world “out there” directly, only our own models of it. And the fact that our physical model of the world — including, say, a physical model of the mind-brain of one’s best friend — does not entail other phenomenal modalities, such as emotions, by no means implies that the real, ontological object out there which our physical model reflects, such as our friend’s actual mind-brain, does not instantiate these things. That would be to confuse the map with the territory. (Our emotional model of our best friend does, of course, entail emotions, and it would be just as much of a fallacy to say that, since such emotional models say nothing about brains in physical terms, descriptions of the latter kind have no validity.)

Denials of this sort can have serious ethical consequences, not least since the most relevant aspects of consciousness, including suffering, fall outside descriptions of the world in purely physical terms. Thus, if we insist that only such physico-mathematical descriptions truly describe the world, we seem forced to conclude that suffering, along with everything else that plausibly has moral significance, does not truly exist. Which, in turn, can keep us from working toward a sophisticated understanding of these things, and from creating a better world accordingly.

* And for this reason, the answer to the question “how do you know you are conscious?” will ultimately be the same as the answer to the question “how do you know physics (i.e. physical models) exist?” — we experience these facts directly.

June 17, 2019

Thinking of Consciousness as Waves

First written: Dec 14, 2018, Last update: Jan 2, 2019.

How can we think about the relationship between the conscious and the physical? In this essay, I wish to propose a way of thinking about it that might be fruitful and surprisingly intuitive, namely to think of consciousness as waves.

The idea is quite simple: one kind of conscious experience corresponds to, or rather conforms to description in terms of, one kind of wave. And by combining different kinds of waves, we can obtain an experience with many different properties in one.

It should be noted that I in this post merely refer to waves in an abstract sense to illustrate a general point. That is, I do not refer to electromagnetic waves in particular (as some theories of consciousness do), nor to quantum waves (as other theories do), nor to any other particular kind of wave (such as Selen Atasoy’s so-called connectome-specific harmonic waves*). The point here is not what kind of wave, or indeed which physical state in general, mediates different states of consciousness. The point is merely to devise a metaphor that can render intuitive the seemingly unintuitive, namely: how can we get something complex and multifaceted from something very simple without having anything seemingly spooky or strange, such as strong emergence, in between? In particular, how can we say that brains mediate conscious experience without saying that, say, electrons mediate conscious experience? I believe thinking about consciousness in terms of waves can help dissolve this confusion.

The magic of waves is that we can produce (or to an arbitrary level of precision approximate) any kind of complex, multifaceted wave by adding simple sine waves together.

In this way, it is possible, for instance, to decompose any recorded song — itself a complex, multifaceted wave — into simple, tedious-sounding sine waves. Each resulting sine wave can be said to comprise an aspect of the song, yet not in any recognizable way. The whole song is in fact a sum of such waves, not in a strange way that implies strong emergence, but merely in a complicated, composite way.

Another way to think about waves that can help us think more clearly about emergent complexity is to think of a wave that is very small in both amplitude and duration. If this were a sound wave, it would be an extremely short-lived, extremely low-volume sound. On a visual representation of an entire song file, this sound would look more akin to a dot than a wave.

And such simple sound waves can also be put together so as to create a song (for instance, one can take the sine waves obtained by decomposing a song and then chop them into smaller bits and decrease their amplitude). It will just, to make a song, take a very great number of such small waves superimposed (if the song is to be loud enough to hear) and in succession (if the song is to last for more than a split-second).

The deeper point here is that waves are waves, no matter how small or simple, large or complex. Yet not all waves are what we would recognize as music. Similarly, even if all physical states are phenomenal in the broadest sense, this does not imply that they are conscious in the sense of being an ordered, multifaceted whole. Unfortunately, we do not as yet have good, analogous terms for “sound” and “music” in the phenomenal realm — perhaps we could use “phenomenality” and “consciousness”, respectively?

The problem is indeed that we are limited by language, in that the word “conscious” usually only connotes an ordered, composite mind rather than the property of phenomenality in the most general sense. Consequently, if we think all that exists is either music or non-sound, metaphorically speaking, we are bound to be confused. But if we instead expand our vocabulary, our confusion can, I think, be readily dissolved. If we think of the phenomenality of the simplest physical systems as being nothing like consciousness in the usual sense of a composite mind but rather as a state of hyper-crude phenomenality — i.e. “phenomenal noise” that is nothing like a song but more akin to a low, short-lived sound, and yet unimaginably more crude still — the problem of consciousness seems to become less confusing.

Avoiding Confusion Due to Fuzziness

A more specific point of confusion the wave metaphor can help us dissolve is the notion that consciousness is so fuzzy a category that it in fact does not really exist, just like tables and chairs do not really exist. As I have argued elsewhere, I think this is a non sequitur. The fact that the categories of tables and chairs are themselves fuzzy does not imply that the physical properties of the objects to which we refer with these labels are inexact, let alone non-existent. The objects have the physical properties they have regardless of how we label them. Or, to continue the analogy to waves above, and songs in particular: although there is ambiguity about what counts as a song, this does not imply that we cannot speak in precise, factual terms about the properties of a given song — for instance, whether a given song contains a 440 Hz tone.

Similarly, the fact that consciousness, as in “an ordered, composite mind”, is a fuzzy category (after all, what counts as ordered? Do psychotic states? Fleeting dreams?) does not imply that any given phenomenal state we refer to with this term does not have exact and clearly identifiable phenomenal properties — e.g. an experience of the color red or the sensation of fear; properties that exist regardless of how outside observers choose to label them.

And although our labels for categorizing particular phenomenal states themselves tend to be fuzzy to some extent — e.g. which part of the spectrum below counts as red? — this does not imply that we cannot distinguish between different states, nor that we cannot draw any clear boundaries. For instance, we can clearly distinguish between the blue and the red zones respectively on the illustration below despite its gradation.

Just as we can point toward a confined range of wavelengths that induce an experience of (some kind of) red in most people upon hitting their retinas, we can also, in principle, point to a range of physical states that mediate specific phenomenal states. This includes the phenomenal states we call suffering, with the fuzziness of what counts as suffering contained within and near the bounds of this range, while the physical states outside this range, especially those far away, do not mediate suffering, cf. the non-red range in the illustration above.

Thus, by analogy to how we can have precise descriptions of the properties of a song, even though an exact definition of what counts as a song escapes us, there is no reason why we should not be able to speak in factual and precise terms about the phenomenal aspects of a mind and its physical signatures, including the “red range” of wavelengths that constitute phenomenal suffering.

* Note that these seemingly different kinds of waves and theories of consciousness can be identical, since connectome-specific harmonic waves could turn out to be coherent waves in the electromagnetic quantum field, as would seem suggested by a hypothesis known as quantum brain dynamics (I do not necessarily endorse this particular hypothesis).

December 14, 2018

“The Physical” and Consciousness: One World Conforming to Different Descriptions

My aim in this essay is to briefly explain a crucial aspect of David Pearce‘s physicalist idealist worldview. In particular, I seek to explain how a view can be both “idealist” and “physicalist”, yet still be a “property monist” view.

Pearce himself describes his view in the following way:

“Physicalistic idealism” is the non-materialist physicalist claim that reality is fundamentally experiential and that the natural world is exhaustively described by the equations of physics and their solutions […]

So Pearce’s view is a monist, idealist view: reality is fundamentally experiential. And this reality also conforms to description in physical terms. Pearce is careful, however, to distinguish this view from panpsychism, which Pearce, in contrast to his own idealist view, considers a property dualist view:

“Panpsychism” is the doctrine that the world’s fundamental physical stuff also has primitive experiential properties. Unlike the physicalistic idealism explored here, panpsychism doesn’t claim that the world’s fundamental physical stuff is experiential. Panpsychism is best treated as a form of property-dualism.

How, one may wonder, is Pearce’s view different from panpsychism, and from property dualist views more generally? This is something I myself have struggled a lot to understand, and inquired him about repeatedly. And my understanding is the following: according to Pearce, there is only consciousness, and its dynamics conform to physical description. Property dualist views, in contrast, view the world as having two properties: the stuff of the world has insentient physical properties to which separate, experiential properties are somehow attached.

Pearce’s view makes no such division. Instead, on Pearce’s view, description in physical terms merely constitutes a particular (phenomenal) mode of description that (phenomenal) reality conforms to. So to the extent there is a dualism here, it is epistemological, not ontological.

The Many Properties of Your Right Ear

For an analogy that might help explain this point better, consider your right ear. What properties does it have? Setting aside the question concerning its intrinsic nature, it is clear that you can model it in various ways. One way is to touch it with your fingers, whereby you model it via your faculties of tactile sensation (or in neuroanatomical terms: with neurons in your parietal lobe). You may also represent your ear via auditory sensations, for example, by poking it and noticing what kind of sound it makes (a sensation mediated by the temporal lobe). Another way, perhaps the clearest and most practical way for beings like us, is to model it in terms of visual experience: to look at your right ear in the mirror, or perhaps simply imagine it, and thereby have a visual sensation that represents it (mediated by the occipital lobe).

(For most of us, these different forms of modeling are almost impossible to keep separate, as our touching our ears automatically induces a visual model of them as well, and vice versa: a visual model of an ear will often be accompanied by a sense of what it would be like to touch it. Yet one can in fact come a surprisingly long way toward being able to “unbind” these sensations with a bit of practice. This meditation and this one both provide a good exercise in detaching one’s tactile sense of one’s hands from one’s visual model of them. This one goes even further, as it climaxes with a near-total dissolution of our automatic binding of different modes of experience into an ordered whole.)

Now, we may ask: which of these modes of modeling constitute the modeling we call “physical”? And the answer is arguably all of them, as they all relate to the manifestly external (“physical”) world. This is unlike, say, things that are manifestly internal, such as emotions and thoughts, which we do not tend to consider “physical” in this same way, although all our sensations are, of course, equally internal to our mind-brain.

“The physical” is in many ways a poorly defined folk term, and physics itself is not exempt from this ambiguity. For instance, what phenomenal mode does the field of physics draw upon? Well, it is certainly more than just the phenomenology of equations (to the extent this can be considered a separate mode of experience). It also, in close connection with how most of us think about equations, draws heavily on visuospatial modes of experience (I once carefully went through a physics textbook that covered virtually all of undergraduate level physics with the explicit purpose of checking whether it all conformed to such description, and I found that it did). And we can, of course, also describe your right ear in “physics” terms, such as by measuring and representing its temperature, its spatial coordinates, its topology, etc. This would give us even more models of your right ear.

Different phenomenological models of the same thing

The deeper point here is that the same thing can conform to description in different terms, and the existence of such a multitude of valid descriptions does not imply that the thing described itself has a multitude of intrinsic properties. In fact, none of the modes of modeling an ear mentioned above say anything about the intrinsic properties of the ear; they only relate to its reflection, in the broadest sense.

And this is where some people will object: why believe in any intrinsic properties? Indeed, why believe in anything but the physical, “reflective”, (purportedly) non-phenomenal properties described above?

To me, as well as to David Pearce (and Galen Strawson and many others), this latter claim is self-undermining and senseless, like a person reading from a book who claims that the paper of the book they are reading from does not exist, only the text does. All these modes of modeling mentioned above, including all that we deem knowledge of “the physical”, are phenomenal. The science we call “physics” is itself, to the extent it is known by anyone, found in consciousness. It is a particular mode of phenomenal modeling of the world, and thus to deny the existence of the phenomenal is also to deny the existence of our knowledge of “physics”.

Indeed, our knowledge of physics and “the physical” attests to this fact as clearly as it attests to anything: consciousness exists. It is a separate question, then, exactly how the varieties of conscious experience relate to descriptions of the world in physical terms, as well as what the intrinsic nature of the stuff of the world is, to the extent it has any. Yet by all appearances, it seems that minds such as our own conform to physical description in terms of what we recognize as brains, and, as with the example of your right ear, such a physical description can take many forms: a visual representation of a mind-brain, what it is like to touch a mind-brain, the number of neurons it has, its temperature, etc.

These are different, yet valid ways of describing aspects of our mind-brains. Yet like the descriptions of different aspects of an ear mentioned above, these “physical” descriptions, while all perfectly valid, still do not tell us anything about the intrinsic nature of the mind-brain. And according to David Pearce, the intrinsic nature of that which we (validly) describe in physical terms as “your brain” is your conscious mind itself. The apparent multitude of aspects of that which we recognize as “brains” and “ears” are just different modes of conscious modeling of an intrinsically monist, i.e. experiential, reality.

The view of consciousness explored here may seem counter-intuitive, yet I have argued elsewhere that using waves as a metaphor can help render it less unintuitive, perhaps even positively intuitive.

April 25, 2018