This seems more political than scientific, despite originating from scientists.
I came to similar beliefs from some very personal experiences outside of the field, and it's just that -- a belief. Trying to turn something that's not really easily provable or not into a labeled 'pseudoscience' or 'not pseudoscience' kind of thing seems to just be asking for grief.
It sort of reminds me of the hullabaloo around a lot of things way back when historically, where the general opinion ended up being horridly wrong. It seems to me like one of the unifying threads was how politically motivated and communicated the outcry was. Again, just an opinion on my part.
I can't say what the nature for reality is or isn't. I do find appreciation in an idea, as another post here alluded to, of consciousness being an illusion of experience.
An analogy that I think of is how a rope gets tied up in a knot. The knot is information, it adds information, it does not change the rope.
But also my beliefs do come from a belief in a more unified metaphysical 'thing' (as it were, to really simplify my belief into a silly analogy) that makes us all up, so a lot of the ideas for me come as our own self concepts being like these temporary hurricanes or bits of self-sustaining 'knots' of information that live for a time, and then pass on (with or without the body experiencing them, as a part of this greater 'thing').
Again, these are just a sort of partial translation of what I believe. Apologies if I explained it poorly.
I think spiritual things are hard to study scientifically, and I feel that duality is alright. As others have noted here, you could call many theories "pseudoscience" by the very same logic as the above, as best as I understand it. :'((((
Unless there's a clear and present harm I don't see much reason in political pressure to suppress the idea. Perhaps I'm missing something here, unfortunately. I don't think I know the whole story yet, there has to be a cohesive explanation for how this (potential) rift has formed. :'))))
Except that testability is one of the core principles of science. If there isn't a way to prove/disprove what you are claiming then we can assert all sorts of things and call it science, at which point science loses all it's credibility
> If there isn't a way to prove/disprove what you are claiming
I don't think you can ever prove/disprove anything perfectly. Scientists create models/theories which fit(not always perfectly) into current observations.
I think the point is, there were many years (decades) where String Theory was NOT testable.
During all that time, research was occurring, it was called science, even though it was not yet testable. Was String Theory during that time a pseudoscience?
Science doesn't appear 'out-of-the-box' instantly testable. There is a lot of time of speculation, and thought, and pondering with ideas that ebb and flow, before something gets defined enough to test.
If science is not valid if it is not testable, then what are all these researchers in theoretical physics doing? There is plenty of work going on today that is not yet 'testable'. How do you get to the point of having something to test, if the 'science' up until that point is not valid?
My argument being, using testability as the measure to toss ITT out the window, is a bit premature, given testability is actually not the only benchmark for doing science.
> I think the point is, there were many years (decades) where String Theory was NOT testable.
That's inaccurate or incorrect. You're using "testable" in two different ways without realizing it.
From the very beginning, string theory has been testable in the normal sense that scientific theories are testable: it makes predictions, and you can test those predictions. However, it was designed to make the same predictions as quantum physics and relativity.
When people say string theory is "not testable", what they mean is that there are no known, viable tests that allow us to determine whether string theory might provide a better description of the universe than the existing theories.
There was nothing such as, for example, the lensing of starlight around the Sun that helped determine that general relativity's predictions were more accurate than Newtonian ones.
This is very different from the situation with IIT. IIT is not testable at all. In that sense, it is demonstrably pseudoscience, or if we're being charitable, a conjecture that hasn't yet been fleshed out to the level of a testable hypothesis.
I think I'm using it correctly.
You are saying IIT is not testable at all.
For many years (maybe still) String Theory is not testable.
Yet you are trying to say String Theory has some extra quality that is convincing enough to allow us to assume that in the future it might be testable, thus giving it more credibility than IIT.
But what is this difference between two untestable theories?
>"When people say string theory is "not testable", what they mean is that there are no known, viable tests"
If string theory doesn't have any viable tests, and IIT does not have any viable tests. Then you are back to more 'assuming' one can eventually be 'testable' while the other will never be. In the absence of something actually testable, you are making a judgment call that one is 'better' than the other.
>"My conclusion, as you’d expect, is that string theory is not testable in any conventional scientific use of the term."
"Getting around these problems requires working with much more complicated versions, which have become so complicated that the framework becomes untestable as it can be made to agree with virtually anything one is likely to experimentally measure."
I'm not up on current string theory.
I'm just saying, 'theories' often do go through many years of discussion, and re-work, before they crystalize into something 'testable', even remotely testable. So why judge IIT so harshly now when it is still being formalized. To toss it out at such an early stage is just as invalid, based on opinion not anything scientific.
> For many years (maybe still) String Theory is not testable.
You keep repeating this, but it's incorrect in the context we're discussing.
> Yet you are trying to say String Theory has some extra quality that is convincing enough to allow us to assume that in the future it might be testable
No, that's not what I'm saying at all.
I'm pointing out that string theory was designed from the beginning to make the same predictions as existing theories, and it generally did so, with some caveats. In that sense, it was testable from very early on - you could use it to make predictions, and test those predictions.
Peter Woit acknowledges this in the article you linked, writing:
> "simple versions of the string theory unification idea, the ones often sold as “beautiful”, disagree with experiment for some basic reasons."
The fact that the theory is capable of disagreeing with experiment means that it is testable. The theory might be wrong, as in Woit's example, but it's testable. The whole point of a testable theory in this context is that you can use test to determine when or where the theory is wrong.
When Woit says the theory is untestable, he's using the word in a different sense, which he describes in the article. But that is not the same sense in which IIT is untestable.
IIT is untestable because there are not tests that can be used to determine when or where the theory is wrong, as there are with string theory. That's why it's pseudoscience.
> To toss it out at such an early stage is just as invalid, based on opinion not anything scientific.
IIT is 20 years old at this point, hardly "such an early stage".
Had to check, yes, time is moving on, guess IIT is 20 years old.
Curious what tests you think have been done with String Theory.
Both String Theory and IIT, now decades old, and still trying to be tested. Both accused of being 'pseudoscience' and 'untestable'.
Haven't even gotten into the 'over-fitting' problem attributed to String Theory. IF it doesn't fit, keep adjusting it. But does it really predict anything, if it has to keep being adjusted after the fact.
Think you're really splitting hairs on what a 'test' is and what that other article was saying.
Guess even after 20+ years even string theory might finally be tested.
"Many physicists consider string theory our best hope for combining quantum physics and gravity into a unified theory of everything. Yet a contrary opinion is that the concept is practically pseudoscience, because it seems to be nearly impossible to test through experiments."
You can always call any theory about consciousness "pseudoscience" because consciousness is subjective individual experience and the scientific method requires shared consensus which it calls "objective".
By definition if you delve into consciousness you're doomed to be called a scammer sooner or later. And any experiments that could prove or disprove a theory of consciousness would be labeled unethical as it'd require messing with the brain of an intelligent being which can communicate back their experience (i.e. humans).
For this reason I'd say keep all theories at an arm's distance and keep exploring the space. Any confirmation or dismissal of a theory of consciousness is unwarranted jump to conclusions.
Why does a moving electric charge cause magnetism? Why does moving integrated information cause consciousness? We have no clue and yet it's a fact. We're only at the start of this journey and the best we can do is ensure we travel the path long enough to learn more "why-s" before we wipe ourselves out.
"...as a fledging science consciousness research should worry about hanging out too much dirty laundry. If too much is hung out, then petty infighting can destroy an already fragile field. My greatest fear is that we get another “consciousness winter” wherein just talking about consciousness is considered pseudoscientific bunk. This was the state of affairs throughout most of the 20th century, and it set neuroscience back decades."
Behaviorism was the dominant psychological theory of the 20th century. Specifically it tried to downplay introspection, and personal experience and reduce behavior to learned "reflexes". This was debunked quite a while ago, 1970s or so, by Chomsky and others so it sounds absurd to us. but it was the dominant thinking in psychology (at least in the US) up until that point.
The founder of 20th century behaviourism, Watson, specifically stated /"Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent upon the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness"/
Watson's fundamentalist view lasted about as long as took for it to be tried out on a generation of people and then debunked.
The undisputed champion of behaviorism was B.F. Skinner who wrote /"what is felt or introspectively observed is not some nonphysical world of consciousness, mind, or mental life but the observer's own body"/
Skinner was so successful in the experimental field that his school of thought pretty much ran away with things.
It's kind of absurd really looking back, and I'm certain that although it dominated academic thought I doubt it was taken as seriously on the ground. But Academia is where a lot of the intellectual heavy lifting is done and so, yeah perhaps the more nuanced sides of psychology got neglected as "namby pamby" for a few decades but man was the behaviorist outlook brutally effective. In fact it still is the quickest and cheapest way (if not exactly personally satisfying) way to deal with personal psychological conditions.
Your link is interesting, but I don't like your take on somehow this argument between behaviorism and Chomsky being solved and the former being now "ridiculous looking back". This is just the dance of theories, and as a matter of fact, Chomsky has lately started to look like he is quite wrong assessing that a genetic component is required for language acquisition.
> Specifically it tried to downplay introspection, and personal experience and reduce behavior to learned "reflexes". This was debunked quite a while ago, 1970s or so, by Chomsky and others so it sounds absurd to us.
Just because this gets repeated again and again, and is even in some textbooks, doesn't make it true.
Skinner wasn't ever "debunked". The point of Skinner was, in the early half of the last century, that we cannot reliably and objectively "introspect" into the brain. Remember that stuff like MRI was invented 10 years after Chomsky supposedly "debunked" Skinner and fMRI only in the early 90s.
With the advanced methods of today, it is very easy to label the work of scientists a century ago as absurd. But they didn't have all these modern measurement technology back then.
Skinner was never "debunked" - as I said, behavioral methods are still used extensively and effectively. However in a historical context behaviorism was the dominant theory for a good 50 years or so. The adage about "every problem looks like a nail when you've a hammer". The issue is not about Skinner, more to do with mainstream academic thought, which being human is absolutely prone to its indulgences.
I don't want to get into an ideological firefight. I was more responding to GP assertion that GGP's statement was based "on nothing". I was just providing the substance upon which the original statement was probably based.
> But let me end on a positive note. In my opinion, the fact that Integrated Information Theory is wrong—demonstrably wrong, for reasons that go to its core—puts it in something like the top 2% of all mathematical theories of consciousness ever proposed. Almost all competing theories of consciousness, it seems to me, have been so vague, fluffy, and malleable that they can only aspire to wrongness.
This was also where my mind went, and it's cited in the open letter, but it's worth noting that the premise of his critique is that IIT is not pseudoscience. In fact, he praises the theory for being clear enough to be proven wrong!
The question is whether its rival GNW is so much better.
IIT submits that consciousness arises from the integration of information within a system. A system is conscious if it possesses a certain level of integrated information, denoted by the symbol Φ (phi). GNW on the other hand claims that consciousness arises when information is broadcasted to a "global workspace" within the brain, making it available to a wide range of cognitive processes.
Neither has direct evidentiary support and both can explain everything it sees. By that measure it's pseudoscience the lot of them.
So...is this the most constructive way to go about it, or maybe there is another agenda at play here?
This is the key sentence from the underlying letter:
Given its panpsychist commitments, until the theory as a whole — not just some hand-picked auxiliary components trivially shared by many others or already known to be true — is empirically testable, we feel that the pseudoscience label should indeed apply
It seems like a less confrontational label would be "philosophical".
Dismissing by implication a venerable and respectable philosophical theory like panpsychism with such terms gives the impression of arrogant scientism which undermines any criticism that might be useful.
You are the one making that grouping to discredit it. Nobody else is.
I can do the same, String Theory is not respectable, it is as provable as having a soul or there is a flat earth.
Does me saying this now undermine String Theory? That's just some guy on the internet that doesn't understand it. Like you don't understand Panpsychim.
I agree, string theory isn't very respectable. It looks like an attempt to piggyback a convoluted mathematical structure on existing theories, without much benefit.
> Like you don't understand Panpsychim.
It posits the existence of some force of nature to explain consciousness. It can't explain what consciousness is, it can't explain why consciousness has never been observed outside animals with a (reasonably large) brain (and even those are rare) .There's no explanation for that. If there is one, it will include something like "you need a lot of consciousness particles in a particular structure for it to emerge."
Panpsychism is based on the rejection of the possibility that physical processes can explain consciousness. Which makes it all the weirder that it needs an extra physical force to explain it.
>It can't explain what consciousness is, it can't explain why consciousness ...
You are stating the obvious. Its not a science but philosophy. You looking at is as if it were science explaining reality misses the point. That perspective does not apply here.
You are doing the exact same thing you are concerned about, treating a philosophy like a science. Just that you are worried about it being applied and relied on like as science while at the same time trying to verify or discredit it like a science. Your initial idea of it not being a science was quite right, you just havent applied that insight throughout your model. This includes what standards you apply and how you look at it.
Or to put it differently, Plato didnt loose anything when we figured out that matter wasnt just a combination of fire, water, earth and air. That wasnt the relevant point, it was a reference allowing you to think about something else in a specific way. Trying to look at details of that story from a scientific perspective is not much different from trying to build a physical model of the solar system from the bible.
Its just not a sensible thing to do. It corrupts your reality model and lets you do not very sensible things based on not very sensible convictions and judgements.
I seem to have an entirely different opinion of philosophy. Your take is: we shouldn't take philosophy serious? It's just a bunch of random ideas that sometimes help you think in another way? That would explain the esteem for Heidegger and Derrida.
Unfortunately, someone posted a list of articles written on panpsychism. It's really well beyond "your" style of philosophy. And people in all kinds of branches of science (used to) apply Derrida's ideas. So when the original comment wrote "a respectable philosophical theory", I didn't take it to mean: a toy for the empircally challenged.
Regarding what its good for, it allows you to think about higher complexity problems. For example, you wont be able to create a complete ontological description of reality, but there is still some insight you can gain. Epistemology has value, it gave you the scientific method. Its just that that is a later step that has to stand on its own.
> Panpsychism is not a respectable philosophical theory
Says who, The Science?
Is "respectable" a purely objective term, or might there be some subjectivity in play? How would one determine, with perfection?
> unless you want to give ether, a divine soul, idealism, and flat earth the same treatment.
This is the one and only possible way, is it? And you have a proof of that? If not, this is called belief, but belief without philosophy can easily appear as knowledge.
For this situation, I think an even better word than philosophical is blasphemous.
> Is "respectable" a purely objective term, or might there be some subjectivity in play?
That's exactly why I included flat earth in the list. If you're going to argue like that, why is flat earth not a respectable theory? Astrology? Or that thunder is caused by Orko?
To quote Prof. Galen Strawson from one of those papers:
> "Panpsychism is a plausible theory of the fundamental nature of reality. It is fully compatible with everything in current physics, and with physicalism."
That list of recent papers doesn't help your argument. The consciousness problem is not going to be solved by wishy-washy creative writing. Very few, if any, of those authors seem to have seen an experiment up close.
The quote from Strawson continues to assume consciousness is present in every particle in the universe. It presupposes an extraordinary force of nature, unlike any of the others, to escape a relatively small problem, and it's not based on any observation. No form of consciousness has ever been observed outside animals with a (reasonably large) brain (and even those are rare). There's no explanation for that. If there is one, it will include something like "you need a lot of consciousness particles in a particular structure for it to emerge."
Panpsychism is based on the rejection of the possibility that physical processes can explain consciousness. Which makes it all the weirder that they need an extra physical force to explain it.
You claimed that "Panpsychism is not a respectable philosophical theory". The existence of recent papers, from people that include reasonably prominent philosophers, seems to refute this. Unless by "respectable" you're trying to say something about the validity of the theory.
A theory can be respectable, taken seriously by an academic community, without being correct. Perhaps you just used the wrong word.
Yeah, we differ about what "respectable" means, but in that case, your beef is with the original top comment. It argued "Dismissing ... a ... respectable philosophical theory like panpsychism ... gives the impression of arrogant scientism". If respectable means nothing more than a bunch of academics write papers about it, that argument is moot. Since Sokal, it must be clear to everybody that that kind of respectability isn't enough for a theory to be discussed as meritorious. Hence, you can't defend a theory by calling it respectable in that sense.
Somehow, that seems to be more damning than what I called it.
Abstraction, decomposition, recursion, art, literature, psychedelics, the internet and memes, etc etc etc...humans have many tools at their disposal, though there's no requirement for tools to be used.
And, sometimes even a catalyst can be enough to kick off naturally emergent complexity.
The big challenge here is false separation we create with language.
I can say, “consciousness is neural activity” but others will say, what activity, how does activity become conscious, how do you prove those things are the same, all questions which imply a different causal model structure, one in which there are two entities (neural activity and conscious experience) instead of one. (!) the problem is one of cardinality of our model, not lack of evidence; you can’t fit a dualistic two-peg (the mind and the brain) into a monistic one-hole (mind=brain).
This language pattern creates a concept of separation between neurons firing and the mind experiencing. If, in reality, neurons firing ARE mind experiences, then to prove they are identical means to disprove a false separation between two identical concepts.
That’s a tricky problem (of language) to solve with tools (of neuroscience).
The real problem is determining the truth of statements such as this one of yours:
> "If, in reality, neurons firing ARE mind experiences"
Perhaps they are. But does that mean transistors firing are not mind experiences, and computers can never be conscious? If the statement is true, what's special about neurons that they generate mind experiences? That's the real question - "the hard problem" - that many people are attempting to answer.
In my opinion, the recent developments in AI have primarily show us just how much we _are_ just the firing. People argued about whether the computer could be thinking and whether it could be feeling as if those were 2 highly separated, stratified things.
Like you said, it's the hard problem. But i think the connection will come not from thinking that computers are more special, but from thinking of ourselves as less special.
Which is a stance that Buddhism generally takes. There are thoughts, and feelings, but they exist on its own and (sometimes) build up an "ego" which is a fleeting, unstable thing, without its own essence.
Cogiationes sunt is an empiric fact. But cogitationes sunt ergo res cogitans est is not.
It feels a bit like consulting ancient Greek atomists on the nature of covalent bonds. They thought much about the subject sure, but instruments they had were lacking (not that they thought they need any instruments).
If we're talking about "everything that a human or non-human experiences, including what they feel, see and hear," then I'm not sure it's meaningful to distinguish whether it's "real" or "an illusion". You might put forward the theory we're all brains in jars (or the more modern formulation, 'the universe is a simulation'), but the experiences would still be occuring and consciousness would still be a phenomena. See also, Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy.
Ok, how would you write a computer program or train a neural network to experience that illusion?
When a program executes, it follows a strictly "mechanical" procedure. There doesn't seem to be much room for consciousness or the "experiencing" of illusions.
How is it that our brains are capable of experiencing the "illusion" of consciousness?
What is illusory exactly? Is it the brain misrepresenting its own workings? But those misrepresentations are encoded in the brain in the same way as everything else and they do have causal influence on the brain processes. So, those "illusions" are as real as representations of the outside world.
To answer that, first you may have to solve a tricky semiotics problem. And good luck getting consensus agreement ("the" "reality", not "pseudoscience", "nonsense", or various other persuasive (aka "real") memes) even on that step.
I mean, if peer-reviewed psychology research is lacking behind in terms of statistical power and reproducibility, I can only imagine what flaws self-published research would have lol
> Can we just label Psychology in general as pseudoscience?
You sure can, and it has the nice bonus of giving psychologists a phenomenon to study: human's drive to attach pseudo-objective labels to subjective phenomena.
> Pretty much all the “findings” that have been popularized recently have all failed replication.
"Pretty much" is a nice ambiguous term, might that be a consequence of the underlying methodology you used to determine that fact? What was your methodology anyways?
Psychology has many bad practices, and does have a certain amount of pseudo-science in its subdomains, but as a whole it isn't. The subject exists, and there are ways of (indirectly) measuring aspects of it.
> Pretty much all the “findings” that have been popularized recently have all failed replication.
That's partially due to bad practices, partially to the fact that psychology is harder than physics, and partially to perverse funding mechanisms.
No, we can't. Most of psychology deals with the stimuli and responses, which are empirically observable; if it's done properly, that's science.
Consciousness is problematic for science, because it's intrinsically private, and not observable. Each of us knows it's there, and can observe it; but we can't share our observations, and "science" depends on sharing observations.
Perhaps we need a new definition of "science", that can accomodate the private experience that each of us has, but can't share.
or perhaps we stop trying to label every system of thought we want to claim is legitimate as science and leave it only for one’s we are able to apply the scientific method to
They aren't strictly saying IIT is wrong, just that they think it gets too much attention.
Does Bayesian Statistics get too much attention?
>"some researchers in the consciousness field are uncomfortable with what they perceive as a discrepancy between IIT’s scientific merit and the considerable attention it receives from the popular media because of how it is promoted by advocates."
Having some good PR isn't a good reason to say the underlying theory is wrong.
> a “commonsensical definition” would be “something that is not very scientifically supported, that masquerades as if it is already very scientifically established”.
Does this actually sound like a definition of pseudoscience to anyone? If you think about homeopathy and ancient aliens or whatever, does this address the core of why we think those are "pseudoscience" as opposed to just wrong, even confidently wrong? I don't think it does. IIT is probably wrong, and its proponents should probably shut up or at least show more humility, but "pseudoscience" is the wrong label.
I came to similar beliefs from some very personal experiences outside of the field, and it's just that -- a belief. Trying to turn something that's not really easily provable or not into a labeled 'pseudoscience' or 'not pseudoscience' kind of thing seems to just be asking for grief.
It sort of reminds me of the hullabaloo around a lot of things way back when historically, where the general opinion ended up being horridly wrong. It seems to me like one of the unifying threads was how politically motivated and communicated the outcry was. Again, just an opinion on my part.
I can't say what the nature for reality is or isn't. I do find appreciation in an idea, as another post here alluded to, of consciousness being an illusion of experience.
An analogy that I think of is how a rope gets tied up in a knot. The knot is information, it adds information, it does not change the rope.
But also my beliefs do come from a belief in a more unified metaphysical 'thing' (as it were, to really simplify my belief into a silly analogy) that makes us all up, so a lot of the ideas for me come as our own self concepts being like these temporary hurricanes or bits of self-sustaining 'knots' of information that live for a time, and then pass on (with or without the body experiencing them, as a part of this greater 'thing').
Again, these are just a sort of partial translation of what I believe. Apologies if I explained it poorly.
I think spiritual things are hard to study scientifically, and I feel that duality is alright. As others have noted here, you could call many theories "pseudoscience" by the very same logic as the above, as best as I understand it. :'((((
Unless there's a clear and present harm I don't see much reason in political pressure to suppress the idea. Perhaps I'm missing something here, unfortunately. I don't think I know the whole story yet, there has to be a cohesive explanation for how this (potential) rift has formed. :'))))