The Atman, Part 2
Part 2 of 10: Responding to Counterarguments
In my previous essay, Part 1, I presented two “mind-blowing” questions regarding the mysteries of human consciousness. These two questions were:
1. How is it that I’m me and you’re you?
2. How (and why) does consciousness exist at all?
(The philosopher David Chalmers refers to the second question as the “hard problem of consciousness”.)
In Part 1, I argued that these two questions can never be answered by science alone. But not everyone agrees with me. In recent decades, quite a few scientists and philosophers have opined that once science gets advanced enough, it will break new ground, and it will be able to explain consciousness all by itself.
I have identified six hypotheses about how the mysteries of consciousness might fall under the domain of science: 1. Pure physicalism, 2. New mysterianism, 3. Quantum mind, 4. The self as a parallel universe, 5. Consciousness as a fundamental, and 6. Panpsychism. In this essay, I will critique these six arguments, because I do not find them to be satisfactory.
These six arguments are not completely distinct. There is some overlap between some of them. In particular, there’s a lot of overlap between arguments 3 and 4 and between arguments 5 and 6. But I will address each argument separately.
I consider arguments 1 and 6 to be very easy to refute, and arguments 3 and 4 to be somewhat easy. However, arguments 2 and 5 are much trickier, and I had to think about them in depth before I knew how to respond to them. For arguments 2, 3, 4, and 5, I will use the same trick: I will refer to the first of my two “mind-blowing” questions. Most of the philosophical debate surrounding consciousness focuses on the second question, the hard problem of consciousness. However, it would be instructive to pay more attention to the first question, because even if some scientific theory could answer the second of the two questions (and that’s a big “if”), there’s no way it could answer the first. (The philosopher Richard Swinburne has made the same point, by the way.) As such, the first question is actually more effective than the second at demonstrating the logical problems in the physicalist worldview.
Without further ado, here is how I would respond to these six arguments:
1. Pure physicalism: neuroscience alone can explain consciousness with no difficulty.
Physicalism is the belief that all mental activities, including consciousness, are really just processes in the brain. These processes might be complex, but there’s nothing mysterious or metaphysical about them. It’s only the brain.
Pure physicalism (which is more formally known as eliminative materialism) is most closely associated with Daniel Dennett, a philosopher at Tufts, although there are numerous other authors who agree with him, including Georges Rey and Paul and Patricia Churchland. Dennett propounded his physicalist views in his 1991 book Consciousness Explained. He echoes the ideas of his doctoral advisor, Gilbert Ryle, from half a century before him. Dennett and his physicalist colleagues believe that the science of the brain is sufficient to explain all mental phenomena, including consciousness.
Related to this, Dennett argues that our idea of the self is only an illusion. He’s not alone: most of the authors who argue that consciousness is scientifically explainable also hold that the self is an illusion. Since Dennett believes that we are just brains having experiences, he maintains that there is no coherent “self” that persists through time; there are merely processes in the brain. And since he thinks consciousness can be fully explained by neuroscience, he maintains that there is no “hard problem” of consciousness.
But the problem with pure physicalism is the two “mind-blowing” questions, which its proponents simply ignore. Dennett denies that the hard problem of consciousness exists, but he’s wrong. It does exist, and it is the undoing of physicalism. The essence of the hard problem of consciousness is the observation that neuroscience alone provides no account of phenomenal consciousness. Essentially, if pure physicalism were true, then consciousness wouldn’t exist at all. Given that consciousness does exist, that means pure physicalism is false.
This argument was made more eloquently by David Chalmers in his 1996 masterpiece The Conscious Mind. In that book, Chalmers used the idea of “philosophical zombies” to illustrate the failure of physicalism. Philosophical zombies, or p-zombies, are supposed to be identical to humans except that they lack consciousness. They would look and behave just like us, and their brains would be identical to ours, but there’s no one home. They would still have consciousness in the cognitive sense (i. e. sensations of their environment or of themselves), but they would lack phenomenal consciousness (i. e. lived experience). P-zombies would be objects, not conscious beings. Obviously, p-zombies don’t exist, but they could exist in an imaginary world. We can conceive of them. And the fact that we can conceive of them shows the impossibility of pure physicalism. If consciousness were just brain chemistry, then we would all be p-zombies. Given that we’re not, that means there must be more to consciousness than just brain chemistry.
To be fair, pure physicalism (i. e. eliminative materialism) is not the only form of physicalism. Philosophers have proposed various other physicalist theories of consciousness which are a little more subtle than eliminative materialism but which are still physicalist, because they still hold that consciousness can be addressed by neuroscience alone, with no further facts needed. These modified forms of physicalism include emergentism, functionalism, neutral monism, anomalous monism, property dualism, biological naturalism, epiphenomenalism, and new mysterianism. (They never run out of “isms”, do they?)
However, most of these theories are just pure physicalism with a few bells and whistles attached. There is no substantive difference between these modified theories and eliminative materialism. It doesn’t matter if you try to describe consciousness as a “function” or an “emergent state” or a “mental state”: if you claim that consciousness is caused by the brain alone, with no further facts and no mysteries involved, then that is ultimately the same thing as pure physicalism.
As such, the arguments that knock down pure physicalism will also knock down most of these modified theories. For example, David Chalmers’ famous “zombie” argument doesn’t just disprove pure physicalism; it also disproves theories like emergentism and functionalism. Chalmers did a brilliant job of exposing the flaws in all these theories.
To be fair, some of these modified forms of physicalism may be harder to refute than pure physicalism. For example, new mysterianism is a little trickier. But in the end, it still fails, as I explain below. Meanwhile, some forms of property dualism, including John Searle’s “biological naturalism”, seem to be arguing that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe. But if that’s their argument, then their view must be very similar to naturalistic dualism (argument #5), which I discuss, and attempt to refute, later in this article.
But it doesn’t really matter. In the end, none of these theories work, anyway. They can make up as many “isms” as they want to, but within themselves, all these philosophers are just in denial about the fact that consciousness exists outside of the scientific domain.
As for the idea that the self is an illusion, it is possible (but, in my opinion, unlikely) that that is correct. It is possible that consciousness is just some sort of phenomenon, rather than being an actual entity. And even if it is an entity, it’s possible that it doesn’t persist through time (see Part 9).
However, what is not possible is the idea that consciousness itself is only an illusion. Now, I’m not sure if Daniel Dennett himself has gone that far, but he’s come pretty close. And there are some other authors, such as Keith Frankish, who have gone the full distance and claimed that consciousness is an illusion. But they are objectively, indisputably wrong. The existence of consciousness is the one thing in life that we can be absolutely sure of. This was established some 400 years ago by Rene Descartes, who famously declared, “I think, therefore, I am.” His point was that if you are having a conscious experience, then your consciousness must exist. If it didn’t, you wouldn’t be having a conscious experience. And he was right. Thus, while it may be plausible to argue that the self is only an illusion, you cannot argue that consciousness itself is only an illusion. Consciousness is real.
2. New Mysterianism: Science alone can explain consciousness, but even after it explains it, we won’t be able to conceptualize it.
There are some things that science explains, or could explain one day, that we humans just can’t grasp. We know that they’re true, and we accept the science, but we can’t intuitively understand how they make sense. An example would be the oft-repeated scientific result that the universe is expanding. The idea of the entire universe expanding doesn’t make any sense to me, but I trust the science, and I accept that it is true.
According to new mysterianism, consciousness is the same way. Science could explain it, but we wouldn’t be able to conceptualize it. I think the psychologist Steven Pinker put it best when he wrote: “The brain is a product of evolution, and just as animal brains have their limitations, we have ours. Our brains can’t hold a hundred numbers in memory, can’t visualize seven-dimensional space, and perhaps can’t intuitively grasp why neural information processing observed from the outside should give rise to subjective experience on the inside. This is where I place my bet.” (On any position, Pinker is always the one who knows how to phrase it perfectly. He is an excellent writer and speaker.) The most notable advocate of new mysterianism is the philosopher Colin McGinn, but many other thinkers have also endorsed it, including Pinker, Sam Harris, and John Horgan.
But there are two main problems with new mysterianism: it uses bad metaphors, and it fails to address the first of my two mind-blowing questions.
The new mysterians use bad metaphors because they compare mind-blowing questions with topics that are merely difficult to conceptualize. For example, I have no trouble conceiving that seven-dimensional space could exist; I just can’t see it. I have no trouble understanding that I have been given a hundred numbers; I just don’t remember what they are. And I have no trouble conceiving that the universe is expanding; it’s just that I personally can’t understand how it makes sense, because it involves concepts that are over my head. On the other hand, I can’t conceive that a scientific explanation of consciousness could exist at all. It’s not just that I have trouble conceptualizing it; it’s that I can’t even conceive of its existence. If the scientific, material universe were the only thing in existence, then I can’t conceive of how my conscious experiences would be located in my brain, rather than just being the universe itself.
In fact, the same arguments that doomed pure physicalism, such as the example of “philosophical zombies”, also doom new mysterianism. In some ways, new mysterianism was devised as a modified form of pure physicalism that could somehow escape its shortcomings, but it failed. Just as the hard problem of consciousness topples pure physicalism, it also topples new mysterianism.
The failure of new mysterianism becomes even clearer if you consider the first of my two mind-blowing questions: how is it that out of all the people in the world, I got to be Matthew Gliatto? After all, I could have been anyone. How did I get to be me? And how did you get to be you? This phenomenon, that I am me and you are you, is so bizarre and so existential that science alone could never explain it, not even by using indiscernible concepts. New mysterianism might be a semi-credible theory if I were the only conscious being on earth, but given that I’m not, the theory is not tenable at all. Even if scientists made use of some concept that can’t be intuitively understood, they still couldn’t explain how it is that out of all the people in the world, I got to be Matthew Gliatto.
I also think that some of the new mysterians, Pinker in particular, are just making excuses. When presented with the prospect that consciousness might be outside of science, they respond, “Well, it is science ……… you just can’t understand it!” Doesn’t that just sound like a lame excuse?
Now, I do agree with the new mysterians’ conclusion that we humans can never completely understand the mysteries of consciousness. But unlike them, I don’t think that consciousness is a scientific reality that humans just struggle to conceptualize. I think it is outside of science.
3. Quantum mind: Consciousness can’t be explained by classical science, but it can be explained by quantum physics.
Quantum physics is a very weird and confusing subject, and personally, I don’t think I will ever be able to understand it. Neither will most people. It tends to blow everyone’s minds. As such, some thinkers have proposed that it could be the key to understanding the mystery of consciousness. They claim that since quantum physics has such a history of defying everyone’s expectations and introducing novel and counterintuitive ideas, it just might be able to pull off the impossible and explain consciousness scientifically. This argument is most closely associated with the physicist Roger Penrose, but other thinkers have made similar claims.
But the problem with this argument is the same as the problem with pure physicalism: science is the study of things, and consciousness is not merely a thing. Science is the study of third-person phenomena, while consciousness is a first-person experience.
It is true that quantum physics tends to defy our expectations. It involves concepts like the Copenhagen interpretation and the dual wave-particle nature of light. But in the end, it’s still just science, and science is still the study of third-person phenomena. Quantum physics could never explain how it is that I got to be Matthew Gliatto, or how it is that I am the center of my own universe, or how it is that my universe is me while your universe is you. Quantum physics can explain many amazing things, but it can’t answer the two mind-blowing questions — particularly not the first one.
In fact, some scientists have criticized the idea of the quantum mind on purely scientific grounds. In particular, they point out that physically speaking, there’s nothing special going on in your brain. After all, there is consciousness in your brain, but there is no consciousness in a table. Therefore, if you’re proposing that quantum physics is the answer to the mysteries of consciousness, that would would imply that there must be some very unusual scientific condition in the human brain, such as an extremely high temperature or an extremely high speed, that is found nowhere else in nature and that causes some special “quantum” event, which, in turn, would give rise to our consciousness. But there is no such condition in the brain. Your brain is not like a black hole or a supernova. It’s just a bunch of cells. From the perspective of physics, your brain is nothing special. It’s not that unusual. Thus, the idea that quantum physics explains consciousness is not plausible.
4. The self as a parallel universe: Each person’s consciousness constitutes a separate universe.
We’ve all heard of parallel universes, from science fiction movies and jokes in pop culture. Parallel universes are usually conceived of as being just as real as our universe, but somehow different. And supposedly, these parallel universes can coexist with our universe, even though you could never perceive them in any way. In some contexts, parallel universes are conceived of as alternative outcomes in which something had happened differently in the past which caused the course of history to end up differently than it did in our universe. But in any context, a parallel universe is always considered to be completely separate from our own.
Anyway, this particular argument attempts to resolve the first of my two mind-blowing questions by positing that every person’s consciousness constitutes their own universe. So I have one universe in my head, and you have a “parallel universe” in your head. And indeed, it does seem like my consciousness is somehow my whole universe and your consciousness is your whole universe, which would make them essentially parallel universes. So while I disagree with this argument, I do understand where it’s coming from.
I actually don’t know of any established thinkers who have promoted this argument, but it has been promoted by some of my fellow bloggers and also by Deepak Chopra, who is a discredited pseudoscientist.
However, it’s not hard to debunk the argument. There are (at least) four problems with it:
A. I don’t believe in parallel universes, anyway. Independently of my views about consciousness, the idea of there being more than one universe has always seemed implausible to me. Thus, I reject any argument that involves parallel universes.
B. Unlike parallel universes, our consciousnesses are all living in the same world. Parallel universes are always conceived of as existing completely apart from each other. There is no connection between them. However, there is certainly a connection between my consciousness and your consciousness: we’re both living in the same world. My consciousness is in my brain and your consciousness is in your brain, but our brains are both parts of the same world. Thus, the phenomenon of consciousness is very different from the theory of parallel universes, in which there is no connection.
C. There’s nothing special going on in your brain. I made the same point when I was discussing the theory of the quantum mind (see above). If your brain generates a new universe, but nothing else in nature generates a new universe, then there must be something extremely unusual happening in your brain, like, say, something moving at the speed of light. But there’s not. From the perspective of physics, your brain is not that unusual of an object. It’s just a bunch of cells.
D. Most importantly, this argument fails to address the first of my two mind-blowing questions. Even if we’re arguing that each person’s consciousness is their own whole universe, that still fails to explain how it is that I got to have my universe, while you got to have your universe. Again, I could have been anyone — how did I get to be Matthew Gliatto?
I actually do think that each person’s consciousness is, in some way, their own whole universe. But I don’t think that this “universe” is the kind of universe that falls under the domain of physics (not even the most theoretical branches of physics). I think it is the kind of “universe” that belongs only in the domain of metaphysics and that can never be explained (or even detected) by science.
5. Consciousness as a fundamental: Consciousness is an irreducible, scientific building block of the universe, along with mass, charge, etc.
Science starts out with a set of building blocks: mass, energy, electric charge, space, time, etc. None of those things can be defined in terms of other things: they are just the irreducible building blocks of the universe. They are the fundamental properties by which we measure everything in the world.
Some philosophers posit that consciousness could just be another one of those. There’s mass, energy, charge ……… and consciousness. So the proponents of this argument are dualists, because they consider consciousness to be something separate from the matter of the brain, but they are also physicalists, because they argue that even consciousness belongs to the natural, scientific world.
The philosophers David Chalmers and John Searle have both promoted versions of this theory, even though they have many disagreements with each other. Searle calls it “biological naturalism” and connects it to property dualism, while Chalmers presents it in a more physics-related context and calls it “naturalistic dualism”. (He has also connected it to panpsychism — see below.) But both men agree that there will one day be science that explains how consciousness relates to the other fundamental properties, like mass and charge, and that we will then accept that consciousness is just a scientific property. Chalmers has even predicted that there will one day be equations involving consciousness, just as there are equations involving mass, energy, charge, etc.
Out of the six arguments, this is the one that I find most difficult to refute. In fact, I partially agree with it, because I do think that consciousness is some sort of fundamental property of the universe. But I think it is a metaphysical property, not a scientific property. I think it lies beyond the realm of science. I have four reasons for thinking this:
A. Consciousness is fundamentally different from things like mass and charge. Mass, energy, and charge are just properties of objects. They are third-person phenomena. However, consciousness is something entirely different: it is a first-person experience. It is inherently subjective. It’s your own whole universe. As Chalmers would say, it’s the movie playing in your head. Thus, it doesn’t make sense to put consciousness in the same class as things like mass and charge, because consciousness is something very different.
B. Positing that consciousness is one of the fundamentals of science would still fail to address the first of my two mind-blowing questions. Even if we understood consciousness to be one of the fundamentals of the universe, that would still leave my first question completely unanswered. Okay, maybe my brain possesses this fundamental property called consciousness. But how is it that my brain is me and your brain is you? How is it that out of all the people in the world, I got to be Matthew Gliatto, and you got to be you?
If a theory of consciousness is going to be satisfactory, it has to be able to address both of my two “mind-blowing” questions. Since this fifth argument (that consciousness is a fundamental) only addresses the second question, it is not satisfactory. (By the way, a philosopher named Richard Swinburne has made the same point.)
C. If consciousness is a fundamental, then it must be an undetectable fundamental. Chalmers’ argument holds that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe, like mass and change. That means that it would be a new property that has never been discovered before and that exists independently of the other properties. But if that’s the case, then this “property” could never be detected, except by the one person who’s experiencing it. (And furthermore, that one person only knows of it because he is experiencing it.)
There is an old philosophical mystery called the “problem of other minds”. Basically, it means that you can never be sure that there are any conscious people in the world besides yourself. For all you know, you might be the only person on earth who has phenomenal consciousness, while everyone else is just a philosophical zombie. Obviously, any sane person operates under the assumption that other people do have consciousness, but hey, you can’t prove it.
The reason for this is that under the current methods of science, it is impossible to detect consciousness. Chalmers himself has pointed this out many times. Even if you scanned someone’s brain, you couldn’t detect their consciousness. You might be able to detect the neural correlates of consciousness, but you could not detect phenomenal consciousness. The brain scan, by itself, could not establish whether or not the person is having any conscious experiences. (Again, I am just quoting Chalmers’ own arguments.)
Nor would it be possible for some futuristic technology to be able to detect phenomenal consciousness. As Chalmers himself argues, phenomenal consciousness is a further fact: even if you knew everything about the material world, you still would know nothing about whether or not something is having conscious experiences. As such, it’s not even hypothetically possible that a machine could ever detect a person’s consciousness. We can never really be sure that anyone other than ourselves is conscious.
Furthermore, the only reason that we know that we ourselves have consciousness is because we are living it, not because we can detect it scientifically. The reason I know I am conscious is because, as Descartes famously declared, “I think, therefore I am”. In other words, I know that I have conscious experiences simply because I am living them. But it’s not like I could use a machine to detect my own consciousness. It’s not like I could gather data from my senses to prove that I am conscious. I can’t. That will never be possible. Thus, our knowledge of our own consciousness is experiential knowledge, not scientific knowledge.
Thus, we have demonstrated at a very important fact about consciousness: it is impossible for any scientific instrument or any scientific procedure to detect a person’s consciousness. Scientific instruments measure the material world, not conscious experiences.
Therefore, if we’re going to argue that consciousness is a new property of science, we will immediately run into trouble, because it must be an undetectable property whose existence can never be known with certainty (except by the subject itself). And that’s not scientific. If something can’t be detected or measured, then it’s not scientific. It does not belong to the discipline of science. That leads me to my next point.
D. Conjectures about consciousness do not meet the criteria for being considered science. The question of what constitutes science is a central question in the philosophy of science. Different people might give slightly different answers, but I think we would all agree that if something is science, then it has to be observable, it has to be measurable, and it has to be connected to other scientific phenomena (and preferably, we could quantify this connection with equations).
But if we’re going to define consciousness as one of the fundamentals of physics, then it meets none of those criteria. As explained above, you can’t detect consciousness. And if you can’t detect it, then you can’t measure it, either. And if it can’t be observed or measured, then you can’t connect it to any other scientific phenomena, except perhaps in vague terms. (And we’re certainly not going to have an equation for something that we can’t even detect.)
Also, even if we could determine exactly when consciousness is present and when it isn’t, that would be the best we could ever do. We could never quantify it (as we do with mass and charge), because it’s just a binary distinction: on or off. We could never make an equation for it, nor could we explain how it is increased or decreased by other scientific properties (again, it’s binary). The best we could ever do would be to say that under conditions X, Y, and Z, the brain is conscious, but under other conditions, it isn’t. And from a scientific perspective, that wouldn’t tell us anything that we didn’t already know.
The idea of consciousness as one of the fundamentals of physics seems like a plausible idea at first, because it does seem like consciousness is some sort of fundamental property of the universe. But there is a difference between scientific properties and metaphysical properties, and when you reflect on the mysteries of consciousness, it becomes clear that it doesn’t make sense to define it as a scientific property. Science is the study of things that can be observed and measured, not the study of mysterious realities whose very existence could never be detected by any machine.
6. Panpsychism: everything in the world possesses some degree of consciousness.
Panpsychism is the idea that everything has consciousness. If you remember your Greek root words, you might remember that pan means all and psyche means soul. So panpsychism is the idea that everything has a soul, i. e. that everything has consciousness.
I do not have very nice things to say about panpsychism.
When you first hear about the concept of panpsychism, it should strike you as absurd, because it seems to be implying that things like rocks and lakes and chairs have consciousness, which, of course, they don’t. And personally, I would agree with you. I think it is absurd, which is why I don’t believe in it.
But panpsychists have several ways around this problem. Most of them would tell you that consciousness is an inherent property of the universe and that all elementary particles possess some form of consciousness. They go on to argue that a rock or a lake does not have consciousness as a whole; rather, each individual atom in the rock or the lake possesses consciousness by itself. But even though rocks and lakes are not conscious, the human brain is conscious, because the brain is an organized structure, while rocks and lakes are not.
Some panpsychists also claim that there are varying degrees of consciousness. They might say that an atom has only an elementary degree of consciousness, while a human brain has a much more advanced degree. They might also claim that machines that measure things have a degree of consciousness that is proportional to how advanced they are. For example, a thermostat could have one unit of consciousness, a speedometer could have two units, a computer could have ten units, and a human brain could have one thousand units. Or something like that. They think that there is a scale of consciousness that depends on how advanced something is.
Many different philosophers have promoted some form of panpsychism over the course of history. Several of the ancient Greek philosophers promoted some form of panpsychism, as did William James, Bertrand Russell (to some extent), and Alfred North Whitehead in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Whitehead was probably the most notable proponent of panpsychism in the 20th Century.
The theory has seen a resurgence in recent decades. In modern times, panpsychist philosophers include David Chalmers, Galen Strawson, Thomas Nagel, Annaka Harris, Roger Penrose, and Philip Goff. (To be fair, David Chalmers is not a complete panpsychist. He has promoted panpsychism as just one of several viable theories of consciousness. He also connects it to his theory that consciousness is an irreducible property of the universe.)
It is also worth pointing out that panpsychism is similar to the beliefs of some of the world’s oldest religions, which hold that all objects in nature possess a spirit.
Panpsychism is presented as a solution to the hard problem of consciousness because it considers consciousness to be a fundamental property of the universe (kind of like the fifth argument), but which is possessed by every particle on earth. Thus, it should not surprise us that humans have consciousness because everything has consciousness.
But the problem with panpsychism is that it is absurd, and therefore, it is not true. Only animals (including humans) can be candidates for consciousness. If something is not an animal, then it’s not conscious. Atoms are not conscious. Thermostats are not conscious. Everyone knows that. It’s just common sense.
In fact, I think panpsychists seem to have forgotten what consciousness is. You can’t define consciousness as some sort of weird scientific property that is found throughout nature. No, consciousness is the thing that you have in your brain that enables you to experience the world. It’s the thing that gives a human brain first-person experiences, rather than just being a third-person object. And when you remember that, it should be quite apparent that atoms do not have consciousness. Neither do thermostats or speedometers. Only animals could ever have consciousness. Everyone knows that.
Panpsychists respond to the charge that their theory is absurd by pointing out that many great scientific discoveries seemed absurd when they were first proposed — for example, the theory of relativity. But that reminds me of a quote from Carl Sagan: “The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses.”
In order to debunk panpsychism, you don’t need any philosophical argument; you just need common sense. But I will present a philosophical argument anyway. It’s called the combination problem, and it is often used as an argument against panpsychism. It goes like this: panpsychism holds that every little particle has consciousness. This is used to explain how a human brain has consciousness. But how could a set of conscious particles in the brain give rise to the conscious experience of the brain overall? After all, it doesn’t seem like you have a set of many different consciousnesses; rather, it seems like you have just one consciousness. It does not seem plausible that a series of little consciousnesses could add up to one conscious experience.
But we didn’t even need that argument. All we needed was a bit of common sense. Panpsychism holds that atoms are conscious, that thermostats and speedometers are conscious. All you have to do is take a step back and think about those claims. Do you really think that an atom has consciousness? Do you really think that a thermostat has consciousness? Obviously not.
And that’s why panpsychism is false.
***
I have made my case that the mysteries of consciousness are beyond the realm of science and therefore cannot be explained using science alone. In my next essay, Part 3, I will discuss why so many philosophers are convinced that they can be (I will accuse them of being biased). In Part 4, I will make my own attempt to address the mysteries of consciousness. Since I contend that science alone cannot answer them, I will address them by using a philosophical concept: the Atman. (The word “Atman” comes from Hinduism, although personally, I am not a Hindu.) To be sure, that is only a guess, and it does not completely answer the questions. But nothing ever will, and therefore, a guess is the best we can hope for.
Other parts of this series:
Part 1: Consciousness is Beyond Science
Part 3: We Need Not Fear Immateriality
Part 4: Definition of the Atman
Part 5: Brain, Soul, Self, Atman, Mind
Part 6: The Views of the Philosophers
Part 7: [under revision]
Part 8: The Atman is the Definition of Life
