The Revaluation of All Values, Part 7.1

The metaphysical continuity between consciousness and matter

*Note: I’m breaking part 7 into multiple posts so I can keep with my regular posting schedule and so each post isn’t more than ~3,000 words.

---

Think about the last time you watched a sunset. The golden light and the feeling of awe you may have experienced did not result from the sunset itself, nor were they solely the result of brain activity. These perceptions and feelings result from the interactions between your nervous system and the world around you. These interactions are experiences, and at this point there is no scientific or philosophical consensus in sight about how those experiences relate to the physical organization of your brain and body. How does something as intangible as experience emerge from something as physical as the brain? Does experience emerge from the brain? If so, how do the complex interactions of atoms, molecules, and neurons give rise to the vivid, inner world we all seem to inhabit? Are these even the right questions? Are we so sure that brains give rise to consciousness, or is that just an assumption?

Attempts to understand the relationship between consciousness and matter have occupied some of humanity’s sharpest minds. The most common position among philosophers of mind and lay people appears to be that phenomenal consciousness (i.e., the capacity for experience) emerged at some point during the evolution of life on earth, perhaps at the same time that central nervous systems evolved. This emergentist position initially appears to be plausible, but many (including myself) believe that it is ultimately incoherent. This is because the leap from wholly non-conscious matter to conscious matter entails a kind of miracle. 19^th century psychologist William James put it best when he said:

Consciousness, however small, is an illegitimate birth in any philosophy that starts without it, and yet professes to explain all facts by continuous evolution. If evolution is to work smoothly, consciousness in some shape must have been present at the very origin of things. Accordingly we find that the more clear-sighted evolutionary philosophers are beginning to posit it there. (William James, The Principles of Psychology ch. 6)

Or, as Galen Strawson put it, nature does not make sudden leaps. Emergence is very real, of course, but emergent properties are logically entailed by their underlying substrate. Water tension is an emergent property, but water tension is logically entailed by the properties of water molecules, e.g., hydrogen bonds. If consciousness is an emergent property, we have no idea how it could be logically entailed by brain activity. The only scientific theory that provides a logical and necessary connection between physical organization and consciousness is integrated information theory (IIT), but IIT has panpsychist rather than emergentist implications.

Part of the issue is that it is perfectly conceivable, at least to myself and many others, that an organic automaton with the exact same physical organization as myself could exist and engage in the same behavior as me without having any experiences at all. This thought experiment is referred to as philosophical zombies or P-Zombies, and was made famous by philosopher of mind David Chalmers. The point here is not to say that P-Zombies are real or could exist in this universe, but is only to say that given everything we know about brains, neurons, etc., P-Zombies are perfectly conceivable.

I think the implications of this fact are sometimes misunderstood by critics. The conceivability of P-Zombies serves to demonstrate that there is (at least currently) no logical, necessary connection between brain activity and experience. This is in contrast to most other examples of emergence. Given what we know about hydrogen bonds, it is simply not conceivable that water molecules could congregate in the exact same way as they do in a lake or puddle without resulting in water tension. There are no water puddles without water tension, nor is it conceivable that they could exist. Water tension is logically and necessarily entailed by the properties of H20 molecules while consciousness is (apparently) not logically or necessarily entailed by the physical organization of the brain. Or, if it is, we have no idea how.

For those who believe that emergentism is incoherent, there are basically two other options: either consciousness is fundamental/ubiquitous or consciousness doesn’t exist at all. The most influential version of the latter option is called “illusionism”. Some philosophers, most famously Daniel Dennett, have claimed that natural selection has tricked us into believing that experiences like pain or the color red have phenomenal properties while in actuality they do not. I’m not going to spend too much time on this view here. It’s enough to say that I am in full agreement with Galen Strawson’s assertion that the denial of phenomenal consciousness is the silliest idea in the history of philosophy:

What is the silliest claim ever made? The competition is fierce, but I think the answer is easy. Some people have denied the existence of consciousness: conscious experience, the subjective character of experience, the “what-it-is-like” of experience. Next to this denial—I’ll call it “the Denial”—every known religious belief is only a little less sensible than the belief that grass is green. (Strawson, 2018)

Others have taken a nearly opposite stance to the illusionists, claiming that phenomenal consciousness is fundamental or ubiquitous. This includes idealists like Bernardo Kastrup and panpsychists like Alfred North Whitehead. Idealists believe that the world is entirely consciousness/mind, with physicality being emergent or illusory. Because this post is not meant to be a discussion of every ontology of consciousness, I’m not going to discuss idealism in detail here. To be brief, I still haven’t decided whether there is any substantial difference between some versions of idealism and the view I will lay out below. There are obviously differences of emphasis and vocabulary, but I’m not entirely convinced those differences are meaningful.

Below I will discuss the final option, panpsychism, in more detail. I will make the case, in concert with philosophers like Tsarina Doyle, Galen Strawson, Justin Remhof, and David Skrbina that Friedrich Nietzsche endorsed a version of panpsychism. This version of panpsychism suggests that phenomenal consciousness, in some form, is present in all things. It does not privilege consciousness as being more fundamental than physicality. Matter and consciousness are ontologically continuous rather than one emerging from the other.

In sum, there are at least four competing understandings about the ontology of phenomenal consciousness. There are competing interpretations within each of these schools of thought, but each represents a unique understanding of how consciousness fits into the world around us.

1. Emergentism, which says that consciousness/experience did not exist at all, then emerged given some particular physical organization (e.g., a central nervous system). As best I can tell, this is the most common position.

2. Illusionism, which says that evolution has tricked us into believing we are phenomenally conscious when we actually are not.

3. Idealism, which says that the world is fundamentally consciousness/mind, and that physicality is emergent or secondary.

4. Panpsychism, which says that consciousness is present, to one degree or another, in all material (I would include neutral monism in this category despite claims that it is different from panpsychism).

Nietzsche on Consciousness

On the surface, Friedrich Nietzsche didn’t seem to contribute much to this debate. He rarely discussed consciousness in his published writings and even when he did, he was not talking about phenomenal consciousness. Any time Nietzsche uses the word “consciousness” in his published writings, he is clearly referring to self-consciousness or the capacity for self-reflection. In these passages, Nietzsche suggests that consciousness arrived late in the history of life and is unique to humans. He claims that consciousness arose in humans because of our highly social nature and the need to communicate our inner state to others. While that is probably true of our unique capacity for self-reflection, there is no reason to believe it would be true of phenomenal consciousness, and some of Nietzsche’s unpublished notes make it clear that he was not referring to phenomenal consciousness with these statements. For example, Nietzsche recognizes that feeling and perception existed much earlier than human beings.

Although Nietzsche didn’t explicitly discuss phenomenal consciousness in his published work, the philosopher Tsarina Doyle has made the case that Nietzsche’s position on phenomenal consciousness is integral to his response to nihilism. According to Doyle, Nietzsche’s “Revaluation of all Values” simply doesn’t make sense if phenomenal consciousness is epiphenomenal or illusory. There is, Doyle suggests, an ontological commitment about consciousness baked into Nietzsche’s philosophy.

Doyle’s reading of Nietzsche is controversial among Nietzsche scholars. She argues that Nietzsche attempts to make objective value claims and that these objective value claims rely on metaphysical claims about consciousness. On the surface, Doyle’s assertions might seem absurd. Nietzsche’s perspectivism (i.e., that all value/truth claims rely on a particular perspective) and his disdain for metaphysics seem to preclude both claims about objective values and metaphysical claims. But these apparent contradictions are at least in part due to the limitations of language, and the fact that 19^th century German words do not always have 1:1 correspondence with modern English.

When Nietzsche criticizes metaphysics (which literally means ‘beyond the physical’), he is criticizing the claim that there exists some realm of existence that is above and beyond the physical world, and that value is projected from that metaphysical realm into the physical world. Platonism’s notion of forms and Christianity’s notion of God are both metaphysical in this way. Nietzsche’s criticism of metaphysics therefore has little to do with modern philosophical debates about the ontology of consciousness. Similarly, Nietzsche’s perspectivism doesn’t preclude the possibility of objective value. This is because the will to power is, for Nietzsche, a kind of overarching perspective such that all other perspectives are particular manifestations of the will to power. As discussed earlier in this series, this means that the will to power can provide the basis for making objective value judgements.

In this post and its sequel I am going to explore Nietzsche’s ontological commitments about consciousness, including how those commitments relate to the will to power and his response to nihilism. I will make the case that a modern scientific theory of consciousness — Integrated Information Theory (IIT) — has extremely similar and perhaps even identical ontological commitments. In both cases, it is recognized that consciousness does not arise or emerge from matter, but that phenomenal consciousness and matter are totally inseparable. You can’t have one without the other.

Both Nietzsche and IIT also recognize that phenomenal consciousness has some relationship with causation such that all actual causal forces include a mental component. This view is obviously controversial, but IIT and Nietzsche both have good reasons for defending it.

This panpsychism is one of the most surprising and controversial implications of IIT. IIT suggests that the degree of consciousness is determined by the complexity of the arrangement of matter, with complexity defined as simultaneous differentiation and integration. According to IIT, all integrated ‘wholes’ are conscious to one degree or another. A spoon, table, rock, or planet is not a whole in this way and therefore none of these objects are conscious according to IIT. A single atom, however, is a whole and would therefore have some modicum of consciousness. The human brain/body system is monstrously complex compared to a single atom and therefore the degree of consciousness afforded to a human is astronomically elevated in comparison to the degree of consciousness afforded to a single isolated atom. But according to IIT, the atom is an integrated whole and therefore has some infinitesimally tiny modicum of consciousness. Guilio Tononi has said that this counter-intuitive result is not what he had in mind when he created IIT. It’s just a consequence of the theory.

In discussing these matters, it’s first necessary to be clear about exactly what is meant by consciousness. Consciousness is sometimes thought of as the capacity for thought or self-awareness. Clearly this cannot be the case if, as IIT suggests, an atom has some modicum of consciousness. Atoms, or simple organisms like bacteria, do not have central nervous systems, and therefore cannot think or experience anything resembling human emotion, feel pain or pleasure, or have any self-awareness or capacity for self-reflection. They obviously cannot see, hear, touch, taste, or smell. Most identifiable features of our own experience could not exist without a central nervous system or sensory organs. Must this mean that entities without central nervous systems have no experience at all? Are thought, emotion, pain, pleasure, self-awareness, sensation, or other such feelings necessary components of experience? Or are they instead features of the experience of complex organisms like us? Is there some other, more fundamental and simple kind of experience that even something like a bacteria might have?

I think the main obstacle to having these discussions is that people often have wildly different unstated assumptions about how to conceptualize consciousness. If your conception of consciousness entails that consciousness must only be a property of humans or other complex organisms (e.g., because it necessarily consists of being self-aware), then we are simply working with different conceptions of consciousness and there can be no real communication on this issue. If you have any interest in following my line of thought here, you will need to be open to the possibility that there is a simpler, more fundamental kind of experience than our own, which is at the foundation of our own experience but is not unique to us, and which could potentially exist even in the absence of a nervous system. If you consider that kind of experience to be prima facie impossible or extremely implausible, then I can’t imagine anything I have to say here will change your mind.

It is conceivable, at least to myself, that even very simple organisms, and perhaps even simple wholes like an atom, can experience will. I will make the case in part 7.2 that the will, for Nietzsche, is a metaphorical way of talking about the causal structure of an integrated system, which is what IIT attempts to capture through the idea of integrated information. Even simple organisms like bacteria integrate information in the pursuit of their biologically instantiated goals, and therefore have a will. An atom integrates a very tiny amount of information and therefore has a very tiny will. This integrated information, though infinitesimally small compared to the amount of information integrated by the human brain, is identical to phenomenal consciousness according to IIT.

The No-No Word

The word ‘panpsychism’ is a no-no word among many serious philosophers of mind. For them, it amounts to the worst kind of mysticism and woo-woo and should not be tolerated among serious thinkers. Patricia Churchland is easily the most hysterical of these types, claiming that “Panpsychism is… the consequence of knowing next to no science”, and comparing it to believing in pixie dust, leprechauns, and gnomes. She says this despite the fact that accomplished scientists like Christoph Koch and Giulio Tononi, along with philosophers like Galen Strawson and David Skrbina (none of whom are scientifically ignorant) have defended a version of panpsychism. Besides Churchland, other philosophers of mind have called panpsychism “absurd” (Searle, 1997) and “ludicrous” (Mcginn, 1999).

These detractors tend to be either illusionists, who believe that phenomenal consciousness is a trick of the mind, or emergentists, who believe that phenomenal consciousness emerges from wholly non-conscious matter when it is organized in a particular way. They pillory panpsychist views for being untestable, but fail to explain how their own views could be tested. I have yet to see anyone convincingly explain how either illusionism or emergentism are directly testable. That’s not a criticism of illusionism or emergentism because no ontologies of consciousness are currently testable. There is simply no way to definitively test whether a bird, grasshopper, flatworm, bacteria, or anything else is having an experience. We can identify the neurological or behavioral correlates of consciousness in humans (though really we are identifying the correlates of awareness/responsiveness), then extrapolate those correlates to other animals with complex nervous systems. But, as every good scientist is aware, correlations have little to say about underlying causes.

We assume other human beings are having experiences because we are. Since other human beings are quite a lot like us, we think we can safely assume they have experiences like we do. Applying that same assumption to anything else will necessarily consist of educated guesses and intuitions, especially as we move farther away from humans on the evolutionary tree. Most people are pretty sure their pet dog is having an experience. Many would be less sure about their pet goldfish. Far fewer would attribute consciousness to water bears or sea monkeys. Even fewer would attribute consciousness to bacteria. And fewer still would be willing to attribute experience to an atom, like IIT does. These disagreements about what types of things are having an experience cannot be definitively settled through experimentation. There are no scientific methods that can definitively determine whether an organism is having an experience and it’s hard to conceive of what that kind of test would even look like.

Despite some claims to the contrary, physics also has nothing to say about the ontology of consciousness. Modern physics consists of equations describing the structure and behavior of matter/energy and has nothing to say about the intrinsic nature of matter/energy. For this reason, as Galen Strawson correctly stated, physics is neutral about the ontology of consciousness:

Physics may tell us a lot about the structure of physical reality, but it doesn’t and can’t tell us anything about the intrinsic nature of reality insofar as its intrinsic nature is more than its structure. On this matter physics is perfectly silent. (Strawson, 2018 p. 158)

What many fail to understand is that their own preferred ontology of consciousness cannot be supported by direct experimental evidence. In order to decide on an ontology, we must use other methods. We must make an inference to the best explanation based on everything else we know about the world. I believe that the best explanation consists of a monism in which consciousness and matter are continuous rather than one emerging from the other. This view could be considered a form of neutral monism or panpsychism.

I’m not here to convince you of my own view of consciousness. My goal in the rest of part 7 is to explain why and how Nietzsche was a panpsychist, unpack IIT’s panpsychist implications, demonstrate the substantial overlap between Nietzsche’s and IIT’s positions, and explain why this version of panpsychism was necessarily tied up with Nietzsche’s response to nihilism. Part of my goal in this series is to integrate Nietzsche’s response to nihilism with modern scientific findings. Demonstrating the overlap between Nietzsche’s will to power thesis and IIT will contribute to that project.

My argument will consist of four claims:

1. Nietzsche was committed to a form of panpsychism.

2. Integrated Information Theory (IIT) is committed to a form of panpsychism.

3. Nietzsche’s version of panpsychism and IIT’s version of panpsychism have substantial similarities.

4. Nietzsche’s panpsychism was a necessary component of his response to nihilism.

Part 7.2 will expand on each of these claims.