Daniel Dennett Was a Serious Thinker—But His Materialist View of Reality Was Flawed
Panpsychism paints a better picture.
So long, Daniel Dennett, who contributed meaningfully to the admittedly meandering human conversation. His conversations with Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris made for fascinating viewing for this pathologically curious individual. Which is not to say I agreed with him or the other ‘Horsemen’. I admire Daniel for his work. I just cannot agree with his hard-headed materialist view of reality. Let me say why.
Materialists say that at its most basic level, reality is made up of physical stuff alone. Consciousness only emerges when certain complex configurations of material — say, brains—evolve. The flaw with this picture is that there is a hole in the middle of it: a great big hole that we generally called the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness. It is one thing to describe the mechanisms of the brain—the way neurons fire and so on. It is quite another to explain the subjective experience of being a human being, which is what philosophers call qualia. Love, as Satan notes in The Devil’s Advocate, is no different biochemically ‘from eating large amounts of chocolate’. This is not quite true, but he highlights the distinction between brain activity and how reality manifests to us.
Love, as Satan notes in The Devil’s Advocate, is no different biochemically ‘from eating large amounts of chocolate’.
So materialism falters here. And as it does, panpsychism, its rather quirky cousin at the metaphysical family gathering, grows in self-confidence. The central claim of panpsychism is that consciousness is not just a happy accident (if, indeed, it is so happy) of certain physical processes, but a fundamental feature of the universe. In other words, my shoe collection does not feel the existential dread that greets me on certain mornings, but it does possess a certain basic form of consciousness. Consciousness is an ontological primitive—that is, it is irreducible to something else.
Now, this closes that rather large gap between ‘inanimate’ matter and conscious beings like ourselves. If everything is conscious to some extent, then there is no need to explain how consciousness emerges from non-consciousness, as Daniel Dennett claimed. Matter and consciousness are like ice and water: very different in respect of their properties, and yet the same thing in distinct states. Hard-nosed materialists may find this view unpersuasive simply because it seems to go dead against common sense. And yet their view is like saying a magic show is science because the magician wore a lab coat. They claim that consciousness simply leaps into existence when matter arranges itself in the right way. And there is no proof of that.
What is the proof of panpsychism? Well, research in cognitive science and philosophy is more and more supportive of the panpsychists view. A study in the Journal of Consciousness Studies sets out how integrating consciousness as a basic rather than emergent property could provide better explanations for the development of conscious states in organisms. The philosopher David Chalmers claims that panpsychism might be the ‘least bad’ theory we have so far come up with (just as, as Churchill is supposed to have said, democracy is the ‘worst system of government, except for all the others’).
The philosopher David Chalmers claims that panpsychism might be the ‘least bad’ theory we have so far come up with.
It may be worth invoking Occam’s Razor—the idea that the simplest explanation is generally the right one. Rather than suggesting that consciousness emerges at some arbitrary point in material evolution, it applies the same rule across the board: all entities have some kind of consciousness, albeit in differing degrees. Moreover, the panpsychist view involves adopting a certain humility, since it claims that even the most simple things have consciousness, and that the world is not as human-centric as we might like to think. It forces us to reconsider certain spiritual traditions, such as the animism of some indigenous Americans. Animism would be to at least some extent consistent with the panpsychism view.
Materialism looks increasingly shaky. Quantum physicists continues to encounter phenomena so counter-intuitive that it is no surprise that view is falling out of fashion with them (nor is it a surprise that the field in which Nobel Prize winners are least likely to be atheists is physics). Panpsychism seems to me to be a more persuasive view of the universe, ‘democratising’ consciousness, if you like, and so filling in the holes in the materialist understanding. If it turns out that everything does have a ‘mind’ of its own, then we may be able to solve some of the deepest philosophical and scientific problems we currently face. So, next time you party too hard and bump into something, say sorry. It might, in some strange way, have felt that.
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