Schwitzgebel isn’t the first to describe theories of consciousness that way. Tom Bartlett said something similar in 2018 at Chronicle of Higher Education, where he asked pointedly, “Has consciousness lost its mind?” But it is hardly usual for a professional philosopher like UC Riverside’s Eric Schwitzgebel—whose PhD thesis was supervised by Elisabeth A. Lloyd, Alison Gopnik, and John Searle — to speak that way about a branch of his own discipline in a serious think vid.

He was speaking to Robert Lawrence Kuhn in an episode earlier this year (”What Things are Conscious?” Jan 17, 2024, 10:46 min). The impetus for his reflections was conscious computers and panpsychism (everything is conscious).

Here’s Kuhn’s introductory question:

Consciousness is the great mystery of inner awareness. Where does it exist? Humans, obviously. Animals? Which animals? Chimps, elephants, dolphins, dogs? Termites, snails, amoeba, bacteria? What about non-biological intelligences like supercomputers of the future? The question probes the deep nature of consciousness.

On conscious computers, Schwitzgebel’s main concern is the moral hazard of making a wrong choice: What if we assume that highly developed computers are not conscious and then we turn out to be wrong?

Schwitzgebel: [4:34] I am inclined to agree with what you just said that if we don’t blow ourselves up and if technology continues to progress that eventually we’ll create some sort of artificial entities that exhibit outward behavior that seems very natural to interpret as indicative of consciousness. Now, my inclinations are skeptical so I’m not entirely sure whether we should say such a thing would be conscious but my inclination is to think that the safer default supposition would be to attribute consciousness in those cases…

I think if we’re going to make an error about such beings, it’s better to err on the side of attributing them consciousness, right? I think it would be a moral horror to say, well, we don’t know whether machines are conscious. We’re going to treat them as non-conscious and so we can enslave them, right? And then if it turns out really, metaphysically or you know, at the root they really are conscious ,that would be horrible, right?

Kuhn [6:20] points out that a materialist view of consciousness would naturally lead us to assume that computers can become conscious. Schwitzgebel agrees… but then Kuhn springs a trap, sort of:

Kuhn: [7:11] And if you have a definition of consciousness, which some people do, which has to do with numbers of interactions per second or complexity of information or something like that, there are arguments that … it’s possible, conceivable that a neutron star is conscious because there are so many different calculations that can be done per second in some very sophisticated way.

Schwitzgebel: [7:37 ] I think there’s something very elegant and attractive in the idea that wherever you have information or sophisticated or complex information processing, you’ve got consciousness. But also it seems a little strange to say that a neutron star is conscious. And you might think that what you really need is a certain kind of goal directedness, which it doesn’t seem like neutron stars have or a certain kind of way that it’s structured or hung together that a neutron star doesn’t have and maybe that’s true. So I’m inclined to think that it’s hasty to say consciousness ==> information ==> neutron stars.

To say that a neutron star is conscious is hasty? Yes, maybe. Just a little… 😉

A conscious neutron star is certainly panpsychism writ large. The difficulty Kuhn and Schwitzgebel face is that the materialist view that allows consciousness to be acceptable to current mainstream science means that the conscious star cannot be dismissed. The only fully materialist alternative is to assume— with late Darwinian philosopher Daniel Dennett (1942–2024) — that human consciousness is an illusion.

It’s at this point that the philosopher offers his host some frank talk about the discipline:

Schwitzgebel: [9:39] I think it’s that there is no solution to consciousness that does not have bizarre implications. I think that the empirical evidence suggests that, right? Attempt after attempt for hundreds of years to address the mind–body problem has resulted in every single well-developed theory having some bizarre implications, right? If it were possible to construct a non-bizarre theory of consciousness, I think probably someone would have already done it.

He blames our “folk intuitions” for the problem. Some thinkers would say instead that the problem arises from seeking a materialist solution to an immaterial reality.

You may also wish to read: Neuroscientist: The “I” of consciousness cannot be explained away. Skeptical philosopher David Hume tried it and, Raymond Tallis says, things collapsed almost immediately. To suppose that unthinking processes can somehow produce a thinking entity as an illusion is a sheer act of faith — faith in materialism but faith nonetheless.