On Physicists dissing Philosophers [I]

I recently discovered panpsychism. That’s the idea that all matter – animate or inanimate – is conscious, we just happen to be somewhat more conscious than carrots. Panpsychism is the modern elan vital. 

When I say I “discovered” panpsychism, I mean I discovered there’s a bunch of philosophers who produce pamphlets about it. How do these philosophers address the conflict with evidence? Simple: They don’t. 

Now, look, I know that physicists have a reputation of being narrow-minded. But the reason we have this reputation is that we tried the crazy shit long ago and just found it doesn’t work. You call it “narrow-minded,” we call it “science.” We have moved on. Can elementary particles be conscious? No, they can’t. It’s in conflict with evidence. Here’s why.

We know 25 elementary particles. These are collected in the standard model of particle physics. The predictions of the standard model agree with experiment to best precision. 

The particles in the standard model are classified by their properties, which are collectively called “quantum numbers.” The electron, for example, has an electric charge of -1 and it can have a spin of +1/2 or -1/2. There are a few other quantum numbers with complicated names, such as the weak hypercharge, but really it’s not so important. Point is, there are handful of those quantum numbers and they uniquely identify an elementary particle. 

If you calculate how many particles of a certain type are produced in a particle collision, the result depends on how many variants of the produced particle exist. In particular, it depends on the different values the quantum numbers can take. Since the particles have quantum properties, anything that can happen will happen. If a particle exists in many variants, you’ll produce them all – regardless of whether or not you can distinguish them. The result is that you see more of them than the standard model predicts.

Now, if you want a particle to be conscious, your minimum expectation should be that the particle can change. It’s hard to have an inner life with only one thought. But if electrons could have thoughts, we’d long have seen this in particle collisions because it would change the number of particles produced in collisions.

In other words, electrons aren’t conscious, and neither are any other particles. It’s incompatible with data. 

As I explain in my book, there are ways to modify the standard model that do not run into conflict with experiment. One of them is to make new particles so massive that so far we have not managed to produce them in particle collisions, but this doesn’t help you here. Another way is to make them interact so weakly that we haven’t been able to detect them. This too doesn’t help here. The third way is to assume that the existing particles are composed of more fundamental constituents, that are, however, so strongly bound together that we have not yet been able to tear them apart. 

With the third option it is indeed possible to add internal states to elementary particles. But if your goal is to give consciousness to those particles so that we can inherit it from them, strongly bound composites do not help you. They do not help you exactly because you have hidden this consciousness so that it needs a lot of energy to access. This then means, of course, that you cannot use it at lower energies, like the ones typical for soft and wet thinking apparatuses like human brains.

Summary: If a philosopher starts speaking about elementary particles, run.--Sabine Hossenfelder [HT Wayne Myrvold; see also Myrvold's response to Hossenfelder here.]

I have never blogged about Sabine Hossenfelder before, but I often enjoy her blogs about contemporary physics. Importantly, she is a critic of much faddish talk within physics (she is especially critical of string theory). For those who share my empiricist sensibilities, she is especially good (see also her book), I think, on how in mathematical physics aesthetic biases may generate evidential dead-ends. (Her book is useful corrective to those who think theoretical virtues are reliable or simple.) Of course, in the book and in her blogs many of her reflections shade into what one may call philosophy (or philosophy of science).* To her credit; she is aware of this (p. 219). For example, in her book she accepts the philosophical argument -- I call it so because it was developed by philosophers in the twentieth century -- that because there is no time and money to test all possible hypotheses, the choice of which hypothesis to test is informed, in part, by aesthetic and social values (see p. 35--she would like to get rid of the former). 

However, in her book 'philosophy' seems to mean something like, 'the dispensable and useless, pre-scientific discipline that is a playground for useless ideas or puzzles about reality that have not been solved yet.'+ (See pages 29; 51; 85; 137, 219 etc.)** And it's quite clear she associates contemporary philosophy with the proposal of Richard Dawid (see here a link to his book) that some scientific theories can be evaluated with 'non empirical" assessment (p. 31). It's  not that she is unaware of philosophers with a deep knowledge of physics; she is, in fact, not principally against taking advice from philosophers -- see her hopes on p. 40/p221, and the advice quoted on p. 218ff --, but Dawid's is not the advice she wants because she thinks this is a weakening of the philosophical method (41). (For what it's worth, I agree with her, although wouldn't formulate it like that.) 

Okay, let me turn to her post. Let me start by saying that I have made fun of contemporary panpsychism (in a 2015 book review in TLS), so it's not that I do not understand the impulse to do so.  And I have not changed my mind that most versions of panpsychism (see here for an intro) that I am familiar with try to solve a difficult problem (consciousness, spooky action at a distance, etc.) by introducing a universe full of difficult problems. Hossenfelder actually tries to do better than that and offers a purported empirical refutation of it. This refutation relies on the premise:

• [A] if you want a particle to be conscious, your minimum expectation should be that the particle can change. It’s hard to have an inner life with only one thought.

In [A] there are really three claims: 

• [B] To be conscious means one can change outcomes
• [C] To be conscious means one must have an inner life
• [D] One cannot have an inner life with only one thought.

Let me accept, for the sake of argument, [D]. I do so because nothing hinges on it (unless one is inclined to do high modernist, literary experiments) and it is entirely unclear what motivates Hossenfelder to posit it. Perhaps, she thinks that a defender of pan-psychism would have to be committed to the idea that electrons or other particles would have, at most, one idea (because their inner structure is not complex enough for more ideas) or because particles that participate in a double-slit experiment can have one choice; I don't know.

Unfortunately, [B] and [C] are not well thought through. In [B] there is a simple conflation between consciousness and something like freedom (understood as the possibility to change outcomes). But no panpsychist would have to be committed to such freedom. (In fact, one of the most famous panpsychists in history, Spinoza, seems to deny such freedom for all beings, even God.) So, here she simply begs the question by relying on a premise the panpsychist need not accept. In [C] there seems to be a conflation between consciousness, and some particular form of consciousness such as self-consciousness, or higher order consciousness, or an idea of an idea, or having an interior monologue. Now, of course, Hossenfelder has every right to stipulate that consciousness involves an inner life, but it's not clear that in order to make sense of the panpsychist's proposal, the panpsychist would have to agree. So, there is a clear sense in which Hossenfelder is attacking a strawman (by imputing premises the panpsychist does not share).

In fact, as an aside, a Spinozist panpsychist reading Hossenfelder's piece, may, in fact, think she has confirmed one of Spinozism's core commitments, when she writes that "If a particle exists in many variants, you’ll produce them all." This seems very much in the spirit of Ethics 1, proposition 16. Of course, Spinoza had no idea about quantum mechanics, but in articulating his system he was frank that lots of properties of bodies remained to be discovered something that runs through his philosophy (or so I argued).

But, even if she is uncharitable and confused about panspychism, one may still think she offers an empirical refutation:

• [E] if electrons could have thoughts, we’d long have seen this in particle collisions because it would change the number of particles produced in collisions. 

Now, I honestly don't understand why she thinks that if electrons had thoughts and, say [B] were true, this would change the number of particles produced in collisions. It would be quite amazing for any conscious entity if she could think more entities into existence in virtue of thinking.++ (I suspect this would violate all kinds of elementary conservation principles.) If pan-psychism were to require miracles to explain things, then it would be no explanation at all.

Not everything Hossenfelder says about the empirical challenges to panpsychism is silly. For example, she also says,

• [F] you have hidden this consciousness so that it needs a lot of energy to access.

For some panpsychist theories this may well be a firm obstacle. But I suspect that the very idea of burying thought deep inside the internal states of particles, is not the way a panpsychist would wish to go. For this does create many mysteries about the interaction between those invisible internal states and the known states of particles. (This would make Descartes's challenge to explain the interaction between mind and body through the pineal gland almost seem simple by comparison. I can imagine Princess Elisabeth having fun with that.) So, I don't know any panpsychists today who would go this route.***

Okay, when I started this post, I really intended to talk about why some (of course not all) famous physicists (e.g., Feynman, who may never have said, “The philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds,” Hawkins, Neil deGrasse Tyson, [but also Lewis Powell's response], academic spokespeople for a discipline which gets billions of dollars/euros of state funding, nobel prizes, and have high status would be so fond of dissing on philosophy--a relatively insignificant discipline in today's academy. I hope to return to this issue some other time. But this post has gone one long enough. So, let me close with this observation; throughout my life I have had great fun making fun of philosophical over-reach. Philosophy is difficult and often our efforts and delusions are comic. But if you think that philosophy is a playground for useless ideas or "crazy shit", you are probably not going to be very receptive of suggestions emanating from it. You may also not be so inviting to those who wish to offer fruitful advice. But most important, as Dan Dennett taught me, if you reject and ridicule philosophy altogether, you probably end up doing bad philosophy.

 

 

 

*On p. 234 of her book Hossenfelder, claims, in fact, that it would be useful for physicists to have more contact with (ahh) philosophers if physicists rely on intuitions and physicists wish to make their intuitions more scientific. I am unsure this is meant as a compliment to philosophers!

**In fact, when it comes to tackling biases in science, she believes philosophers may well be consulted (see p. 245). 

+She is so convinced philosophy is useless to physics that, despite the fact that I do not really wish to share our dirty linens with somebody so suspicious of philosophy today, I am tempted to refer her to Clark Glymour's polemical manifesto which has a nice list of philosophical contributions to physics/science.

++Of course, one may argue that some turing machines can create other turing machines. I leave this aside.

***Apparently, her target is somebody called Kastrup (who Myrvold points out is not a professional philosopher). I have not read his work, but judging by his web-page and abstracts, he would also not go down this route. He is an idealist, and his approach goes in the opposite direction from the one refuted by [F]. I quote: "there is only cosmic consciousness. We, as well as all other living organisms, are but dissociated alters of cosmic consciousness, surrounded by its thoughts. The inanimate world we see around us is the extrinsic appearance of these thoughts. The living organisms we share the world with are the extrinsic appearances of other dissociated alters." This is rather far removed from inserting consciousness inside hidden structure of particles.

Comments

[George Gale]

Hossenfelder--not to mention deGrasse Tyson--need to read this: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cosmology-30s/

and this: https://aapt.scitation.org/doi/10.1119/1.17386

[Eric Schliesser]

Abe Stone on Facebook writes:
"I think her argument is this: if electrons can have more than one thought, then this is an additional way in which electrons can differ from one another (besides e.g. in spin), i.e., an additional quantum number, which will need to be summed over when you calculate the result of collisions. As she puts it: "Since the particles have quantum properties, anything that can happen will happen. If a particle exists in many variants, you’ll produce them all – regardless of whether or not you can distinguish them. The result is that you see more of them than the standard model predicts."

I think this argument is correct as it stands. Moreover, what it really shows is that contemporary panpsychism is mistaken, not only about the "psychism," but also about the "pan": it is based on a mistaken view about the kind of small parts ("particles") that everything has, in what sense those small parts have qualities, and in what sense the qualities of those parts add up to the qualities of everything."
https://www.facebook.com/eric.schliesser/posts/10155888467071190?comment_id=10155888848431190&comment_tracking=%7B%22tn%22%3A%22R%22%7D

[Robert A Gressis]

I think you alluded to this in your post, but why think electrons can have more than one thought?

[Eric Schliesser]

Why think they have any, or many?