Epistemic status: I could delay posting this to try to perfect it more, but I guess I'm going to err on the side of posting it, then later on fixing it when I become aware of problems.
I don't think I've ever explained directly why I should think that everything is conscious experience.
Some people look for proof, and other people don't listen to that category, or are somewhere in-between. I will attempt a proof, and then discuss things from the perspective of epistemic uncertainty.
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Certainty?
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Argument
1. What conscious experience is, is conscious experience. That is what it is in itself, and it is nothing else, and can't be anything else. If conscious experience experienced something unconsciously, it would not be conscious, and would not be conscious experience.
2. Conscious experience is that which is consciously experienced, and thus is the only thing which can be consciously experienced.
3. We have experience of conscious experience and thus know that it exists. The question is whether non-conscious beings exist.
4. We can posit non-conscious beings. According to the argument being developed here, we don't presuppose anything about them other than that they are beings and that they are not conscious experience. What they are in a more positive sense would depend on which non-conscious beings we were talking about. But this argument needs to take into account non-conscious beings in general.
5. What non-conscious being is in itself is not conscious experience. So conscious experience can't experience it.
6. For conscious experience to change or be causally affected is for there to be a change in what it experiences based on itself or some other being.
7. If conscious experience can't experience non-conscious being, it can't be changed or causally affected by it.
8. Conscious experience can't experience non-conscious being, so it can't change or causally affect it.
9. The world we live in, the world which can affect us in any way, is completely made up of conscious experience.
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25 September 2023:
I think in the Argument above, #6 was not clearly put. What I should have said was something like "For a conscious experience to change or be causally affected is for there to be a change in what it experiences based on itself or some other being. That experience that changes has to connect with the being that changes it, has to experience it."
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Objection: Consciousness Monism might not work
(Pluralism: conscious experience and non-conscious being exists. Consciousness monism: only conscious experience exists. By "exist", perhaps I could really mean "exists in such a way that it can affect us".)
What if a world consisting entirely of conscious beings is incoherent? Maybe the world isn't reason-apt in this area, and neither pluralism nor consciousness monism work? Then, we are left to making decisions in uncertainty, or based on other considerations.
What are some problems with consciousness monism?
Here's one: How can there be multiple conscious beings? I am conscious of my own experience, and nothing else. How is it that I am not conscious of, say, God's experience? My experience body has boundaries. Speaking metaphorically, how does my experience "know" which boundaries it belongs to? Does it belong to God's boundaries, or to mine? Do the boundaries exist apart from the contents? (Then, maybe, "boundaries" = Berkeley's "minds", and "contents" = Berkeley's "ideas"?) I have thought that experiences themselves have causal power ("wills"). So which "boundaries" produce the will that arises from an experience?
Two responses:
a) "Somehow or other" God's experiences contain within
their boundaries multiple sub-experiences (God's experience is of multiple
boundaried experiences). I find myself able to conceive of this, mostly.
Still, I'm somewhat unsatisfied.
b) These problems attend thoughts of any beings that overlap with or are
contained by any others, including any non-conscious beings that are not
in their own "solipsisms". So maybe the problem is in thinking that when
two beings relate, the metaphor is overlap or containment, and not something
like contact?
What would it mean for two conscious experiences to contact each other? Let's say there is Experience A and Experience B. What Experience A is, in itself, is Experience A, and what Experience B is, in itself, is Experience B. Since they touch, they participate in the edges of each other. But an experience body is a unitary thing (at least, so it seems in my experience -- and maybe by definition it is, if an experience body is a unit of experience). So they participate in the whole of each other while remaining separate. This is possible if they become identical copies of each other. They remain separate beings, so that consciousness monism is only a monism of substance, and does not mean that there is only one being. Experience A could contact only a part of Experience B, which could have many other experience bodies, some of these other experience bodies mirroring other beings' experience bodies besides Experience A. So there could be more to Experience B than just its mirroring of Experience A. If "Experience A" is "a creature's experience body" and "Experience B" is "God's experience bodies", then the creature contacts part of God's experience.
(This explanation is new to me and is different from the overlap/containment explanation I've favored in the past. Without investigating, my first thought is that this could cause problems with various things I've relied on in the past, such as "the set of all things" existing, and maybe others.)
Now, by allowing for contact (rather than overlap or containment), have I opened up a way for non-conscious being to interact with conscious experience, by a non-conscious being contacting rather than overlapping/containing/being-contained-by a conscious experience? No, because of #5 in the argument above ("What non-conscious being is in itself is not conscious experience. So conscious experience can't experience it."). Conscious experience can't experience even the edge of non-conscious being, because non-conscious being's edge is not conscious experience.
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Objection: Becoming Conscious (Matrices vs. Metaphysical Darkness)
Can non-conscious being become conscious experience? If so, then maybe it could turn into conscious experience, affect another experience body, stop affecting it, turn back into non-conscious being.
This doesn't work because the past has to be able to cause the present. If the past is not made of conscious experience, it can't cause a present of conscious experience.
Or, if that argument proves unsound or controversial, then here is another:
If non-conscious being became conscious, it could no longer be affected by any non-conscious beings. So it would be cut off from them. But, until it became a conscious experience, it could not contact (or overlap, or contain) any conscious experience. It would be separated by "metaphysical darkness" from conscious experience. There is no way to cross metaphysical darkness, no way to relate through it or conceive of anything on the other side of it. It's a state of total disconnection, which inherently rules out any interaction. There's either darkness, contact, overlap, or containment, and only the last three allow beings to interact.
Two beings that are not contacting, overlapping, or containing each other can come to interact if they are both connected by a matrix (or set of matrices that form one big matrix). For example, in the world of conscious experience, space is a matrix that contain physical objects and allow them to find each other. Matrices contact, overlap, or contain each of the beings that they interrelate.
Non-conscious beings can't contact, overlap, or be contained by matrices made of conscious experience. So they are separate from conscious experience and if they changed into conscious beings at best could become isolated experience bodies (they still wouldn't affect the universe of conscious experience that we inhabit).
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Objection: Consciousness Monism denies our natural intuitions that material things exist
I don't find it difficult to believe that matter exists, as a consciousness monist. In fact, I think there is something material about all experience, even noetic experience. There is a solidity and reality to all experience, as though it is made out of some substance.
From another angle, I like Berkeley's idea of the "perceptual object". The rock that I see is made up of perceptions of it. Its solidity is made up of experience. The rock is real, hurts the foot, breaks the leg, etc. While my personal experience of the rock and what it means are idiosyncratic, they are not divorced from a kind of objective reality of that exact particular rock. The only thing is that all of that reality mentioned in this paragraph is experienced.
Our natural intuitions are not always correct. Or, from another angle, they are always correct in a sense, but when we think about things scientifically, we can add new natural intuitions that follow from rational argument. (This is how we believe that rocks are made up of tiny, invisible objects called molecules.)
The idea with this post is to present a scientific/rational kind of eye-opening, so that new natural intuitions can be observed in our "noetic environment". Like pointing out an object on a table which your eye technically took in already, but which you never noticed, but now you do.
I don't think consciousness monism is a serious offender against natural intuitions and can be as natural to believe as something like the theory that things are made out of things we can't see.
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Probabilities/Credences
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Here is another perspective, for those more attuned to a worldview of epistemic uncertainty.
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Credences
1. We know that conscious experience exists. The question is whether non-conscious being exists. Let's say, naively, that since the existence of non-conscious being is intuitively plausible, but we have no evidence or argument (at this point), to lead us more specifically, that we say that there is a 0.5 probability that non-conscious being exists. ("It either exists or it doesn't, even chance it does or doesn't, 50-50 chance.") (So P(nCB)1 = 0.5).
2. The numbered "Argument" I gave above, including my responses to the "Objections", is plausible and has some evidential weight, we'll say. Maybe it sounds good, but we have somewhat lost the ability to commit to beliefs because we think that there might be some counterargument we haven't heard yet. Let's say we aren't convinced of it, but it also could be true. This substitutes for coming to a conclusion of "proved"/"disproved". The naive value here to assign to how the "Argument" affects credence will again be 0.5. (So P(nCB)2 = 0.5).
3. Should P(nCB)2 be combined in some way with P(nCB)1 to produce P(nCB)1 and 2 (probability of non-conscious beings given both step 1 and 2 in this section)? There's probably a neat answer to this that I don't know. I'm not really sure what to say. Part of me wants to say that a) the new evidence provided by the 0.5 credence "Argument" should cause me to update in some direction, maybe weakly toward P(nCB)1 and 2 = 0 (like to a credence of 0.45). Another part of me feels vaguely like b) it doesn't work that way, like 2 supersedes 1. I rejected the earlier thought c) that 1 and 2 "stack" so that P(nCB)1 and 2 = (0.5 * 0.5) = 0.25. Maybe a) is a compromise between b) and c).
N. Add any other arguments for or against non-conscious beings.
The exact numbers used here for these credences should be updated by the interested reader to reflect their own beliefs, and, unfortunately, I haven't produced a finished formula, but this provides a sort of template for calculating credences, and maybe a weak first anchoring value of P(nCB) (such that there is a 50%, or somewhat less than 50%, chance that there are non-conscious beings).
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