Scientists, we were told recently at MSN, can’t decide if consciousness is real or fake. A short article on that theme by Joshua Hawkins introduces panpsychism (everything is conscious) to a popular audience:

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To understand why this theory is regaining popularity requires us to look at one of the most difficult conundrums that human scientists have ever faced: where consciousness comes from. Scientists have been trying to solve this hard problem for over a hundred years, and while developments in neuroscience, psychology, and quantum physics have come far, we still don’t have a definitive answer.

The argument is regaining momentum, though, thanks in part to the work of Italian neuroscientist and psychiatrist Giulio Tononi, who proposed the idea that there is widespread consciousness even found in the simplest of systems. Tononi and American neuroscientist Christof Koch argued that consciousness will follow where there are organized lumps of matter. Some even believe that the stars may be conscious.

Joshua Hawkins, “Scientists can’t decide if consciousness is real or fake,” MSN, March 25, 2024

I’ve been tracking the growth in the respectability of panpsychism over the years. Essentially, the only two materialist options are “nothing is conscious” and “everything is conscious.” The former is clearly absurd (if nothing is conscious why are you reading this?). So the latter is the alternative that is slowly gaining acceptability, in part via explainer articles like the one quoted.

Hawkins gives a nod to the “nothing is conscious” side, mentioning philosopher University of Sheffield philosopher Keith Frankish, an honorary professor of philosophy at the University of Sheffield, who “told Popular Mechanics that he believes that consciousness is just an illusion of our own minds.”

Consciousness as illusion

The theory Frankish espouses is called illusionism and it is also defended by thinkers such as Tufts philosopher Daniel Dennett (1942–2024), neuropsychologist Nicholas Humphrey, Cornell philosopher Derk Pereboom, and University of Maryland philosopher Georges Rey.

Explaining illusionism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy offers,

It is not being denied here that through the use of our senses, we genuinely encounter a wide range of qualities, for example, in perception, colors, auditory qualities such as pitch and loudness, various textures and aromas. But the qualities so encountered are not properties of experiences; for we do not genuinely undergo any experiences. To be sure, when we introspect, it certainly seems to us that we are the subjects of experiences with widely varying phenomenal character. But we are wrong.

Tye, Michael, “Qualia”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

That point of view is also called eliminative materialism. But whatever we call it, the dilemma is this: to recognize consciousness is to recognize a fundamentally immaterial thing. And the claim that the immaterial thing is an illusion does not make sense. If an illusion exists, it must be a conscious being’s illusion. So if consciousness itself is an illusion, it must be an illusion of a higher consciousness. Unless, of course, it is an infinite series of illusions, but that makes much less sense than just accepting that consciousness is not an illusion.

However, the problem is actually worse than that. Philosopher Edward Feser explains,

Since science is as laden with intentionality as anything else, you will have to eliminate the very science in the name of which you are carrying out the elimination; and since philosophy (including eliminative materialist philosophy) is also as laden with intentionality as anything else, you will also have to eliminate eliminativism. Eliminativism is a snake that eats its own tail. The problem can be danced around, but it cannot be solved…

Edward Feser, “Mad dogs and eliminativists,” August 21, 2013

Materialists have never found a way around the problem that eliminating consciousness means eliminating science. That is probably why panpsychism seems to be getting mainstreamed more often, as in articles like Hawkins’s.

Hawkins ends with the thought, “This is still an area of science that draws a lot of big question marks from scientists. All you can really say for sure is what you believe.” Note that he does not try to privilege Frankish’s eliminativist views over Tononi and Koch’s panpsychist ones, as in “And now here’s what the science really says.” He treats the two views equally. That alone suggests that panpsychism is gaining ground.

We should keep in mind that panpsychism is itself very much a materialist theory. It seeks to naturalize consciousness rather than to debunk it. Thus, the view from science becomes: Yes, you are conscious. But so is the fly on the wall. And so is the wall.

The fact that human consciousness is “not like the others” is still a problem though. So we can expect the war on human exceptionalism to continue unabated for now.

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and

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