I guess I’m starting a blog! I’ve written and abandoned a few blog posts on the hard problem of consciousness, but I’m publishing this one because I think I have something non-trivial to add to the conversation. I’ll try to keep it short.

Let’s start by trying to state the problem as precisely as possible. I think it’s fair to say that most naturalists, or physicalists, believe the following:

1. The universe is fundamentally composed of unconscious components (quarks/gluons/electrons, or superpositions thereof, or strings, or whatever layer of abstraction you prefer);
2. We nonetheless find ourselves experiencing a subjective experience.

If you accept both of these postulates, you find yourself face-to-face with what Chalmers called the “hard problem”, the question of how subjective experience arises from unconscious components.

Illusionism “solves” this problem by denying the second postulate, evidently inspired by the ostrich’s innovative (if apocryphal) technique for warding off inconvenient realities.

Dualism asserts that the universe is fundamentally still made of physical components, but when these come together to process information with sufficient complexity, at some point the “lights come on”, and a subjective experience results. Among people I talk to, this seems to be the most common view, even if they don’t call it dualism.

The trouble here is that I can report on my own conscious experience, and, importantly, I subjectively know those reports to be causally related to the subjective experience itself. Therefore, if conscious experience is somehow distinct from its physical substrate, then the experience can affect the physics as well as vice versa. This seems an unpromising path, since we already have the tools (at least in principle) for explaining our thinking and our reports of subjective experience in terms of physical hardware.

Rejecting the first postulate seems more promising. What does it even mean to say that the physical components of the world are “unconscious”?

Every physical object and system we interact with in the world, we are aware of only indirectly, as mediated via our senses and cognitive processing. All, arguably, except one: our own brain/mind. I actually find the distinction between the words “brain” and “mind” to be illuminating: they describe exactly the same system, but “brain” implies external observation, while “mind” implies introspective observation.

Remaining agnostic to whether either of these methods of observation constitute “objective reality”, we know for a fact that our own brain is somehow simultaneously a gray blob of neurons, and an incredible array of subjective sensations. Those are two fantastically different ways of describing what we know to be exactly the same physical system.

I imagine you can see how this observation leads to what some would call “panpsychism”, and it is certainly pan-something-ism, but I suspect the “psych” part may be more misleading than enlightening. I see no reason to believe, as the true panpsychists would argue, that once you remove all of our brain’s physical hardware for thought and awareness, that we would be left with anything resembling a “mind”. But we would still be left with something, and that’s a less banal point than it sounds.

So the real miracle here is: why would anyone assume the rest of the universe is “just atoms and molecules”? Each of us has exactly zero positive examples for that claim, and exactly one counterexample.

It’s true that whatever the rest of the “cold, dead” universe is, its behavior is far better predicted by some combination of quantum mechanics and general relativity than by psychology or biology. But there’s nothing in principle stopping us from reaching the point where the same can be said of our own brains. If that were to happen, it’d only make it more profound to recognize that we have a conscious experience, and that we are in fact more certain about the existence of our own subjective experience than we could ever be about any physical theory of any kind.

The key observation here is not that we can take a well-defined physical system and describe it in terms of fluffy, flowery language about subjective experience. That would be looking into the wrong end of the microscope. Useless though it may be as a predictive model, pure idealism is infinitely more credible than illusionism. My mind is a subjective phenomenon which is, incredibly, explicable in terms of quarks, gluons, et cetera. Isn’t it a bit closed-minded, then, to look at the rest of the world, also explicable in terms of quarks and gluons, and assert blindly that, nope, there’s nothing else to see here?

By direct analogy to our own brains, we can ascribe the properties of our own conscious experience to other humans, and perhaps other mammals, and yet more dimly to birds, fish, and invertebrates. There is always an implicit assumption that as we get further away from ourselves, that the “lights” of subjective experience fade to black. They certainly fade into something else, but I doubt that something happens to be nothing.

I think that assumption is founded on our tendency to explain the world in terms of ourselves. As a species we’ve long assigned personalities to aspects of nature; a thunderstorm is angry and a sunny day is beckoning us outside. But when there’s no clear way to project humanity on nature, we tend to reach the conclusion there’s nothing there.

That’d lead us to a picture of a universe consisting of one-sided coins except where our subjective knowledge proves the existence of another side. But like with Many Worlds versus Copenhagen, I think that Occam’s razor actually leads us to the weirder and more expansive view of reality outside our own skulls.