Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[Felix]

Our perception of deep sleep or microbial senses is basically blackness - nothing going on.

There are supposedly people who remain conscious during most of their sleep, e.g., here is a report of a man (John Wren-Lewis) who underwent a dramatic and permanent shift in consciousness (during sleep too), after a near-death experience -- http://www.sawka.com/spiritwatch/sectiona.htm

"In fact I seemed no longer to experience sleep as unconsciousness, but rather as withdrawal into something like the pure void-state of the original NDE."

I recall him saying more about that in another article but I couldn't find it. I've read similar reports from other people though. More of his essays: http://www.capacitie.org/wren/archive.htm

[Sy Borg]

Haha, you know I'm a sucker for NDE stories. That is interesting and unusual:

I had no "out-of-body" vision of myself in the hospital bed, no review of my life, no experience of hurtling through a tunnel towards a heavenly landscape and no encounter with supernatural figures urging me to return to bodily existence. I simply dissolved into an apparently spaceless and timeless void which was total "no-thing-ness" yet at the same time the most intense, blissful aliveness I have ever known.

I suppose if one feels wonderful without knowing it, that would provide some health benefits. And certainly, whether we know it or not, it's better to be feeling blissful than otherwise. Still, imagining bliss in a microbe is a tad tricky!

[Tamminen]

Yes Tamminen that is very concise and intuitively true. I like it a lot. However, let us not assume that it puts an end to our discovery of the journey of consciousness through time, space and its relation to the purely physical. You have yet to explicate its travails. You have yet to show how its history leads to its emergence in our familiar world of physical things.

I think subjective time has a beginning but no end, for reasons I have given elsewhere. What is the relation between subjective time and physical spacetime is the "hard problem" of generic subjective continuity, if that hypothesis is true.

[Tamminen]

Our perception of deep sleep or microbial senses is basically blackness - nothing going on. At least nothing that we much value in context of human capability. One might say that "blackness" preceded the "light" of consciousness. I love rocks and believe they are vastly underestimated as emergences, conduits, substrates and energy sources - but they don't notice much

I see subjective time as a series of successive experiences. If there is a gap in physical time between two successive experiences, that gap is not part of subjective time. Experiences are on/off phenomena, as Consul remarked: either there is an experience or there is not. Also weak experiences are experiences, as long as they belong to the continuity of subjective time. This is an essential feature of subjective being.

[Karpel Tunnel]

Our perception of deep sleep or microbial senses is basically blackness - nothing going on. At least nothing that we much value in context of human capability. One might say that "blackness" preceded the "light" of consciousness. I love rocks and believe they are vastly underestimated as emergences, conduits, substrates and energy sources - but they don't notice much

Again I think it is very important to separate function from awareness. I don't think most people's experience of non-rem sleep is blackness. They just don't remember anything from that time. One can, however, become lucid even in non-rem states and then remember darkness, the hum of sleep, and more. After a few years of meditating I noticed that sometimes I would 'wake up' in non-rem sleep. How did I know? Well, I continued to snore - I am, unfortunately a very loud snorer, there were no images, there was this deep pleasant hum of sleep. Sometimes I would go back to sleep, sometoimes I would head into waking up, even sometimes going through hypnopompic/gogic imager (I forget which one is when you are waking up). In India I was told that some meditators experience this, even focus on it as a goal.

My sense is that we are aware in that sleep, though not as fully as when we are awake. However we do not remember. And there are drugs that can do this: they eliminate the memory of what happened, but during the time you are on the drugs you can talk, remember and are clearly conscious.

I also don't think noticing is likely to be rocks type of experiencing. I would guess it is more an experiencing of presence, primarily its own. It has no problems to solves, nor senses per se, so cogntive functioning may be quite limited.

Plants however have many parallels to neural systems, make decisions and choice and are show sign of a much slower intelligence than ours, but an intelligence. I think we will start to agree, as a number of scientists now alreadly believe, that they have both awareness and cognitive functions.

[Tamminen]

About 'functionally fundamental' and 'ontologically fundamental': It is indeed correct to say that I was created by matter. But why was I created? Because I have to be! Whoever or whatever I am, I have to exist. There is no physics, no logic, no being without the being of the subject. This is what I mean by the instrumental nature of matter and the being of the subject as ontologically fundamental. I cannot escape my existence. Not even by dying.

Being is, non-being is not, and being is my being. "The world is my world", said Wittgenstein. But remember the double meaning of the 'I'.

[Gertie]

Consul - apologies for the delay

Gertie wrote: ↑ Yesterday, 11:26 am McGinn is making the argument for experiential states as novel emergent properties of complex physical processes (not necessarily organic brains) as more credible than panpsychism. He could be right, but an argument isn't a established reason. Anyway, if there's o…

What do you think is "the right toolkit for the job" if not the one of natural science? The pseudo- or unscientific one of a so-called "supernatural science" or "spiritual science" perhaps?

I should have said current science. And the reasons to doubt its suitability for the job are obvious. It's the study of public/objective/quantifiable stuff, not private/subjective/qualiative experience. Science has no place for experiential states in the standard model of what the world is made of and how it works, and it doesn't predict its existence or emergence from physical processes.


All that suggests current science is missing something key, and it might be because experiential states are fundamental, and shouldn't be expected to be predicted as manifesting in physical processes, through some mechanistic emergent method. Neuroscientists can observe greater detail of correlation, but they don't even know how to recognise such a mechanism.


All that's possibly a systemic problem with our usual scientific way of objectively/sharedly knowing stuff (why Chalmers calls it the Hard Problem), and philosophers are taking it on. But philosophers can't then ask neuroscientists to look for Property Dualism or Panpsychism to test their hypotheses. Maybe people will come up with hypotheses which predict something which hasn't been discovered by science yet and scientists could go look for it, we'll see.

The mere logical possibility of nonanimal consciousness provides no reason at all not to disbelieve in its actuality, because the question is how probable or rationally plausible it is in the light of our (admittedly incomplete) scientific knowledge? And the answer is that the occurrence of nonanimal consciousness is extremely improbable and implausible.

When our current knowledge is so 'incomplete' that the Hard Problem is an open question, then we can't reasonably discount possibilities because they don't fit a preferred hypothesis. We can say that based on what we have to go on, plants and rocks aren't very similar to accepted conscious entities with brains, so it's less likely they're conscious. But as I've pointed out, if you're using similarity as your criterion, you have to bear in mind you simply might not recognise plant experience.

There's a 'Heirarchy of Inference' which the argument for analogy rests on.

The only thing known for certain are one's own experiential states.

The content of those experiential states imply the existence of a world 'out there' which they describe - including other humans much like me, who report similar experiential states. Them being much like me makes their consciousness plausible, and I can observe they behave much like me when they burn fingers etc.

Scientists have observed neural correlation with experiential states in human reports, so it's plausible to assume that other species with a CNS who also behave as if they're conscious, are. The more like humans, the more similar the experiential states are likely to be. I can have a fair idea 'what it's like' to be another human, less what it's like to a chimp, and much less a bat experiencing sonar or less still a moth drawn to light. and less still a daffodil drawn to light.

A daffodil is so different, I might not recognise the behaviour associated with daffodil experiential states, and believe a daff growing towards light is all down to physical processes - but then the same could be said of bats and chimps and other humans whose behaviour can also in principle be explained solely by physical processes. So in the absence of knowing the necessary and sufficient conditions we should be agnostic. Because we don't even know how we could know.

If it's mysterious how neurophysiological mechanisms can actualize consciousness, it is much more mysterious how any physical systems lacking neurophysiological or even all biophysiological structures and processes can possibly do so.

No it's not. You're used to the idea that brains are correlated with consciousness, but there's no scientific theory or reason which would have predicted that discovery.

And as soon as we leave the biological sphere, the (alleged) actualization of consciousness by non-biological systems becomes sheer magic. What is more and worse, systems are by definition complex objects; but fundamentalist/panpsychist property dualists even assert (absurdly) that noncomplex, structureless, i.e. simple, physical objects such as elementary particles can actualize consciousness as well.

Conscious emergence also looks like magic. We have this concept because we see novel properties emerging in physical systems, but they are all scientifically predictable and causally reducible to the underlying processes. If you say experiential states are causally reducible to physical processes then you need a new explanation because it's not scientifically predictable.

Footnote:
This is what makes substance dualism and theism (which includes the former) so blantantly absurd: Immaterial/spiritual substances (such as the theistic God) are 0-dimensional "soul-points", i.e. absolutely simple substances lacking any form or structure, and any inner space where processes could take place. (A mathematical point has no inside or interior.) At the same time, simple soul-points are said to have nonsimple, complex minds. God is a simple substance with the most complex mind possible. He is even said to have an "infinite mind"; but to postulate the generation of complex (conscious) minds by and "in" simple immaterial substances is to postulate illogical and incomprehensible supernatural magic.

If experience is fundamental to the universe, I'm not sure we can extrapolate from our materialist type ways of explaining the world. We don't know what its laws are, its maths or logic, or if it has anything comparable. We see a comprehensible material world of stuff and laws which look different at different levels of granularity (classical/qm), and we see neural correlation, which suggests there is some lawful correlation between the material and experiential. So we have that to ponder. If experience is fundamental it might require a further granular or paradigmatic shift to understand the correlation, the mind-body relationship, who knows.

Gertie wrote: ↑ Yesterday, 11:26 am Neural correlation is a massive clue as regards the Hard Problem, there's no question, but it's not the explanation. And it's a reasonable basis to invite other species into the Conscious Club based on Similarity (similar neural substrate and associated observed b…

The number of conscious animal species is unknown, and scientists cannot eliminate the possibility that all animals (with a brain) are conscious creatures. For example, insect consciousness seems to be a real possibility, and there's nothing inherently implausible about assuming e.g. that when a bee sees a flower, it has subjective color-impressions. But insects do have a (central) nervous system, whereas plants don't; and it is simply false that there are no good scientific reasons to disbelieve in the brain-independence of conscious states.

OK, so what is the scientific reason, aside from observed correlation?

Gertie wrote: ↑ Yesterday, 11:26 am And because there is reason to think our usual scientific toolkit isn't fit for purpose when dealing with private/subjective/qualiative experience, Philosophy of Mind tries to come up with other approaches, to try to at least get a conceptual handle on the Hard Pr…

There's no science-based reason to be skeptical about the assumption that animal brains are the (only) physical organs of consciousness, that consciousness is physicochemically realized by and in animal brains (only) as a higher-level or system feature of them or the organisms of which they are part.

We should be sceptical, but we aren't in a position to discount it using current science.

Gertie wrote: ↑ Yesterday, 11:26 am The nifty list of the pros and cons of panpsychism could, and probably has, been done for emergence too - some of the objections would be the same, some would refer to specific features of each. As regards the Combination Problem, I agree it looks like a particula…

There is compelling scientific evidence for the brain-dependence of human consciousness,

There is the observation of neural correlation, there is no explanatory scientific Theory.

and it's utterly implausible to claim that it is the only brain-dependent animal consciousness or even the only brain-dependent consciousness in nature,

Yes, as I've already agreed. My point is it reasonable to infer consciousness based on similarity, but not to discount it based on dissimilarity - without knowing the necessary and sufficient conditions, or if consciousness is fundamental.

For where there is consciousness there must be a physical organ of consciousness; but what (material structure) could possibly and plausibly function as an organ of consciousness in a plant, a rock, a single molecule, atom, or particle? (As far as structureless, simple particles are concerned, it is obvious that the answer must be "nothing".)

I don't know and neither does anybody else.

Panpsychists are totally incapable of providing any scientifically plausible explanation of how brainless organisms or even non-biological natural objects—or even simple elementary particles—could possibly become and be subjects of consciousness. As I already said above, the mere logical possibility of nonanimal consciousness provides no good reason at all to believe in its actuality, as panpsychists do.

People suggest possible underlying explanations like Panpsychism or Emergence, but they both have problems which our current science doesn't seem able to resolve, yet anyway. And if that's because experiential states require an explanation which goes beyond our current materialist-based scientific description of what the world is made of and how it works, then Panpsychism is a contender, and science will need to expand its purview.

[anonymous66]

@Gertie - well said.
Have you read Nagel's book Mind and Consciousness? He argues that our current materialist reductionist (to the physical) science is not able to deal with consciousness (and has other issue when dealing with life, consciousness, evolution and morality), so we need to look for another paradigm. In the past, the only other paradigm was theism, but he is an atheist and rejects theism. He suggests some kind of Aristotelian teleology, but admits he doesn't have a competing theory.

[anonymous66]

Nagel's book is Mind and Cosmos, not Mind and Consciousness.

[Chili]

If I like, I can be a materialist regarding the world around me, and then simply drop the presumption or intuition that others have minds. That approach makes the scientific approach to life simple and elegant. I am left with the enigma of my own mind, which is wrapped up with fundamental insurmountable solipsism. You can't have everything, I guess.

[The Beast]

Isn’t that ironic? A rock becomes conscious like the acorn becomes the oak like the rose is in May like the child becomes conscious. Consciousness in full bloom is not the result of experience but its objective is. Can I add an oak and a rose if they have the same objective?

[Karpel Tunnel]

People suggest possible underlying explanations like Panpsychism or Emergence, but they both have problems which our current science doesn't seem able to resolve, yet anyway. And if that's because experiential states require an explanation which goes beyond our current materialist-based scientific description of what the world is made of and how it works, then Panpsychism is a contender, and science will need to expand its purview.

Materialist-based scientific description is exanding its purview all the time. And whatever it decides is real, gets called material, regardless of its qualities. Which is fine, and pretty much built into the idea of finding new things and trying to understand them. So it would simply be a new discovery or understanding of a currently accepted phenomenon, or the explanation of something that is a new phenomenon. And then it will be considered material. If consciousness is a facet of matter or the real, but is affected by the forms and structures of the matter in question, we will then have a new facet of the material. Or if it turns out that there is what might by some be called another type of substance, I guarantee that scientists will still call it matter. Just as they have with all the odd things they found in the 20th century.

[Consul]

What do you think is "the right toolkit for the job" if not the one of natural science? The pseudo- or unscientific one of a so-called "supernatural science" or "spiritual science" perhaps?

I should have said current science. And the reasons to doubt its suitability for the job are obvious. It's the study of public/objective/quantifiable stuff, not private/subjective/qualiative experience. Science has no place for experiential states in the standard model of what the world is made of and how it works, and it doesn't predict its existence or emergence from physical processes.

Experiential states don't have to be scientifically predictable in order to be scientifically explainable.

Epistemological emergentism, which defines emergent properties as unpredictable ones, is compatible with ontological reductionism.

Searle distinguishes between epistemological objectivity/subjectivity and ontological objectivity/subjectivity. Yes, experiences are O-subjective in the sense that for them to be is for them to be experienced by a subject from its first-person, egocentric perspective. Searle has argued that a non-eliminative ontological reduction of O-subjective experiences to O-objective neural processes is impossible. But what he has overlooked is that there's nothing contradictory about saying, as materialist reductionists do, that O-subjective experiences are non-eliminatively/conservatively reducible to O-objective neurological/physical entities in the sense that the former are composed of or constituted by entities of the latter kind. Subjective experiences may well be composed of neurological/physical elements none of which is subjective, such that neuroscience has access to (experiential complexes of) them from its third-person perspective.

All that suggests current science is missing something key, and it might be because experiential states are fundamental, and shouldn't be expected to be predicted as manifesting in physical processes, through some mechanistic emergent method.

What current neuroscience lacks is the requisite neuroimaging technology which would reveal all the microscopic, molecular details regarding the structure and functioning of supercomplex neural networks in the brain that need to be known for a neuroscientific explanation of consciousness.

"Certainly, we can make progress in NCC research, but we should also bear in mind that the results of the research do not amount to the literal discovery of consciousness. None of the data we get from the current research instruments can reveal a level of organization in the brain that would somehow correspond to our phenomenology, and we should not even expect them to find any such thing. The correlations we have detected are not sufficient for the construction of a multilevel model of consciousness, because the phenomena that constitute the sources of the signals (e.g., blood oxygenation levels, single-cell firing rates) detected by our best currently available research instruments are rather distant from the phenomenal level. Still, even the currently available signals might contain correlative information revealing when the phenomenal level is 'on' and when it is 'off' (say the difference between the conscious vs. unconscious state during anesthesia), or when a conspicuous change occurs in its global content (say during binocular rivalry). But this information, though very exciting in itself, is still hopelessly indirect and coarse for the purpose of building a detailed theoretical model.

In the philosophy of science, it has been noted that the development of science depends at least as much on new research instruments as it does on new ideas (Giere, 1988). Many biological phenomena could not have been discovered without the proper equipment and the development of very specific methods. For example, the complex internal structure of the mitochondrion could only be discovered with the electron microscope. Before the appropriate methodology was available the complete explanation of biological respiration and oxidative phosphorylation remained unknown (Bechtel & Richardson, 1992). In cognitive neuroscience, both our theories about the large-scale organization of brain activity and our instruments to observe such phenomena are still quite limited. Even if we forget about consciousness for the moment, there is a lot to be discovered in the brain. New methods and theoretical frameworks will be necessary to make those discoveries. We should not overestimate the state of our current understanding or the capabilities of the currently available research instruments; we are only beginning to open some restricted empirical windows to the living brain.

The difficulty in discovering and explaining consciousness is due to our crude research instruments and lack of established theories in neuroscience rather than to the mystical nature of consciousness. I am not implying that discovering consciousness in the brain is impossible in principle. I merely want to point out that even if consciousness turns out to be a real biological phenomenon in the brain, even our best research instruments are not yet capable of discovering empirically the relevant biological levels of organization in the brain."

(Revonsuo, Antti. Inner Presence: Consciousness as a Biological Phenomenon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. pp. 336-7)

Neuroscientists can observe greater detail of correlation, but they don't even know how to recognise such a mechanism.

Yes, they do.

"According to biological realism, the primary target is to find neural phenomena in the brain that go beyond mere correlative relationships with consciousness. The relationship between the phenomenal level and the lower neural levels is not correlation but hierarchical constitution. The phenomena at the lower neural levels constitute the higher phenomenal level. Thus, what neuroscience should be looking for, it if aims at discovering ad explaining consciousness, are the constitutive mechanisms of consciousness (CMC), rather than just the NCC."

(Revonsuo, Antti. Inner Presence: Consciousness as a Biological Phenomenon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. p. 297)

"If we accept that consciousness literally resides in the brain, then it follows that there must be some biological phenomenon in the brain that literally resembles or is similar to consciousness. Well, what phenomenon might that be? Of course, it is consciousness itself.
A particular experience is a specific pattern of phenomenal features at the phenomenal level of organization in the brain. Hence, to count as the discovery of the phenomenal level, the data we collect should reveal a level of organization in the brain that somehow directly corresponds to our subjective phenomenology. The data must in one way or another reveal the fact that there is a phenomenal world being constructed in the brain. Furthermore, the data should reveal what kind of bundles and patterns of phenomenal features are present at this level, and how they are spatiotemporally organized. The data should allow at least some sort of reconstruction of a model that includes the structure, organization, and content of the phenomenal level: the world experienced by the subject.
This is what discovering consciousness in the brain means: purely brain-based data that allow the construction of a model of the subject's phenomenal world.

In information-theoretic terms, the brain measurement adequate for the discovery of consciousness should constitute an information channel between the phenomenal level (as the object of the measurement) and the neuroscientist (as the subject doing the measurement). Physically, the research instrument serves as the information channel. When data are being registered, entities and activities at the phenomenal level should serve directly as the input domain of the information channel. The sensors pick signals directly originating from the phenomenal level. The outputs of the instrument convey the signals to the researcher. The data structures registered and stored by the measuring instrument (curves, maps, activation patterns, and what-have-you) constitute the output domain of the information channel. They are the only things directly accessible to the researchers. If they do not transmit any information about the state and the contents of the phenomenal level, then nothing does.
A measurement that fulfills these criteria would transmit information directly about the phenomenal level of organization. Such data would allow the reconstruction of a model of the phenomenal level (as it was experienced by the subject during the brain measurement).
…
The only way to distinguish the phenomenon itself from the myriads of its correlates is the fact that the CMC is the only NCC found in the brain that fully explains why the phenomenal world of the subject is in one configuration rather than another. A certain configuration of the CMC supports, constitutes, or realizes a certain configuration at the higher, phenomenal level. A detailed description of the state of the CMC should thus allow us to reconstruct the state of the phenomenal level of organization. In this way it is possible to create genuine understanding of how specific neural states constitute the phenomenal level, and why some other neural activities only show correlations with it."

(Revonsuo, Antti. Inner Presence: Consciousness as a Biological Phenomenon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. pp. 299-300)

All that's possibly a systemic problem with our usual scientific way of objectively/sharedly knowing stuff (why Chalmers calls it the Hard Problem), and philosophers are taking it on. But philosophers can't then ask neuroscientists to look for Property Dualism or Panpsychism to test their hypotheses. Maybe people will come up with hypotheses which predict something which hasn't been discovered by science yet and scientists could go look for it, we'll see.

But panpsychism is scientifically untestable and useless; and it's theoretically incredible anyway.

The mere logical possibility of nonanimal consciousness provides no reason at all not to disbelieve in its actuality, because the question is how probable or rationally plausible it is in the light of our (admittedly incomplete) scientific knowledge? And the answer is that the occurrence of nonanimal consciousness is extremely improbable and implausible.

When our current knowledge is so 'incomplete' that the Hard Problem is an open question, then we can't reasonably discount possibilities because they don't fit a preferred hypothesis. We can say that based on what we have to go on, plants and rocks aren't very similar to accepted conscious entities with brains, so it's less likely they're conscious. But as I've pointed out, if you're using similarity as your criterion, you have to bear in mind you simply might not recognise plant experience.

From the naturalistic perspective, the question is no longer whether (all natural) conscious states are brain states, but how they are constituted or produced by neurological brain states.

If brainless plants were conscious organisms, they would have to contain some recognizable material structure which could function as a CNS substitute capable of generating consciousness; but plants are known to lack such an "ersatz brain".

There's a 'Heirarchy of Inference' which the argument for analogy rests on.
The only thing known for certain are one's own experiential states.

The content of those experiential states imply the existence of a world 'out there' which they describe - including other humans much like me, who report similar experiential states. Them being much like me makes their consciousness plausible, and I can observe they behave much like me when they burn fingers etc.

Scientists have observed neural correlation with experiential states in human reports, so it's plausible to assume that other species with a CNS who also behave as if they're conscious, are. The more like humans, the more similar the experiential states are likely to be. I can have a fair idea 'what it's like' to be another human, less what it's like to a chimp, and much less a bat experiencing sonar or less still a moth drawn to light. and less still a daffodil drawn to light.

A daffodil is so different, I might not recognise the behaviour associated with daffodil experiential states, and believe a daff growing towards light is all down to physical processes - but then the same could be said of bats and chimps and other humans whose behaviour can also in principle be explained solely by physical processes. So in the absence of knowing the necessary and sufficient conditions we should be agnostic. Because we don't even know how we could know.

I think we know enough to be justified in not staying agnostic(ally) neutral about phytopsychism, and in claiming that (certain types of) electrochemical processes in a CNS are both necessary and sufficient for consciousness.

If it's mysterious how neurophysiological mechanisms can actualize consciousness, it is much more mysterious how any physical systems lacking neurophysiological or even all biophysiological structures and processes can possibly do so.

No it's not. You're used to the idea that brains are correlated with consciousness, but there's no scientific theory or reason which would have predicted that discovery.

So what? That conscious states (and its subjective contents) aren't (yet) predictable and scrutable a priori on the basis of neurophysiological knowledge of the brain doesn't mean that they aren't reductively explainable in neurophysiological terms.

And as soon as we leave the biological sphere, the (alleged) actualization of consciousness by non-biological systems becomes sheer magic. What is more and worse, systems are by definition complex objects; but fundamentalist/panpsychist property dualists even assert (absurdly) that noncomplex, structureless, i.e. simple, physical objects such as elementary particles can actualize consciousness as well.

Conscious emergence also looks like magic.

The emergence of consciousness from animal brains is still scientifically unexplained, but an emergence of it from things other than animal brains is scientifically unexplainable in principle and truly magical if consciousness is attributed to nonliving things, especially to single molecules, atoms, or particles.

We have this concept because we see novel properties emerging in physical systems, but they are all scientifically predictable and causally reducible to the underlying processes. If you say experiential states are causally reducible to physical processes then you need a new explanation because it's not scientifically predictable.

There's a distinction between epistemological ("weak") emergence and ontological ("strong") emergence, and there's a further distinction between causal/etiological reduction and existential/ontological reduction.

E-emergence is compatible with O-reduction, but O-emergence is incompatible with O-reduction. Whether consciousness is merely E-emergent, i.e. E-emergent yet O-reducible, is the point at issue in the debate between reductive materialists and nonreductive ones.

To say that Xs are causally reducible to Ys is to say that Xs are (epiphenomenal or non-epiphenomenal) effects or products of Ys; and if causes/producers are different from their effects/products, then causal reduction is incompatible with existential reduction/O-reduction.

When we talk about "novel properties emerging in physical systems", we need to clarify first whether we're talking about merely E-emergent ones, which are O-reducible, or about O-emergent ones, which are O-irreducible (and also E-emergent).

E-emergent properties or states are higher-level ones which are not predictable or scrutable a priori (non-empirically) on the basis of knowledge of those lower-level properties or states from which they emerge. As far as I know, there are E-emergent properties/states in chemistry and biology too that are not so predictable or scrutable—despite the fact that all chemical and biological entities are O-reducible to (complexes or systems of) microphysical ones. So phenomenological properties/states aren't the only E-emergent ones.

If experience is fundamental to the universe, I'm not sure we can extrapolate from our materialist type ways of explaining the world. We don't know what its laws are, its maths or logic, or if it has anything comparable. We see a comprehensible material world of stuff and laws which look different at different levels of granularity (classical/qm), and we see neural correlation, which suggests there is some lawful correlation between the material and experiential. So we have that to ponder. If experience is fundamental it might require a further granular or paradigmatic shift to understand the correlation, the mind-body relationship, who knows.

As opposed to (theistic) substance dualism and substance spiritualism, naturalistic panpsychism (fundamentalistic attribute dualism) includes substance materialism about the substrates or subjects of mental/experiential attributes. If all material substances or objects, or at least some kinds of fundamental ones have (physically irreducible) mental/experiential properties in addition to their physical ones, then the set of basic physical laws must be supplemented by a large set of (physically irreducible) psychophysical laws (concerning psychophysical correlations, connections, or interactions).

However, one basic problem is that the defenders of the interactionistic, non-epiphenomenalistic version of (fundamentalistic or emergentistic) attribute dualism seem unable to explain mental causation in non-magical, non-supernatural terms.

The number of conscious animal species is unknown, and scientists cannot eliminate the possibility that all animals (with a brain) are conscious creatures. For example, insect consciousness seems to be a real possibility, and there's nothing inherently implausible about assuming e.g. that when a bee sees a flower, it has subjective color-impressions. But insects do have a (central) nervous system, whereas plants don't; and it is simply false that there are no good scientific reasons to disbelieve in the brain-independence of conscious states.

OK, so what is the scientific reason, aside from observed correlation?

There is very strong scientific evidence that experiential states don't just correlate with, but are both causally and existentially dependent on neural states: Anesthesiologists can switch consciousness off or on at will through chemical manipulation of neural processes.

"A commonsensical idea about causation is that causal relationships are relationships that are potentially exploitable for purposes of manipulation and control: very roughly, if C is genuinely a cause of E, then if I can manipulate C in the right way, this should be a way of manipulating or changing E."

Source: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-mani/

Correspondingly, if some manipulations of X are always followed by the same alterations of Y, then this is evidence for a causal relation between X and Y.

There is compelling scientific evidence for the brain-dependence of human consciousness,

There is the observation of neural correlation, there is no explanatory scientific Theory.

As I already said myself, a mere description of correlations is not an explanation of them; but my point is that it is not the case that we aren't justified in believing that animal brains are in fact the (only) organs of consciousness unless we have a reductive explanation of how (exactly) conscious states are physicochemically realized by and in them.

For where there is consciousness there must be a physical organ of consciousness; but what (material structure) could possibly and plausibly function as an organ of consciousness in a plant, a rock, a single molecule, atom, or particle? (As far as structureless, simple particles are concerned, it is obvious that the answer must be "nothing".)

I don't know and neither does anybody else.

This is what makes panpsychism totally incredible! If consciousness is not to be a supernatural phenomenon, it must be fully grounded in concrete material structures and processes; so if there aren't any such identifiable brain-like organs of consciousness in nonanimals, they cannot be subjects of consciousness.

People suggest possible underlying explanations like Panpsychism or Emergence, but they both have problems which our current science doesn't seem able to resolve, yet anyway. And if that's because experiential states require an explanation which goes beyond our current materialist-based scientific description of what the world is made of and how it works, then Panpsychism is a contender, and science will need to expand its purview.

If panpsychistic/fundamentalistic property dualism is true, the existence of the basic experiential properties or states of microphysical objects is a brute, i.e. inexplicable, fact of nature. So it is an attractive contender only insofar as it can offer an explanation of how non-fundamental experiential properties/states (macroexperience) can naturally emerge from the fundamental ones (microexperience). But this means that it has its own emergence problem!

I know panpsychists such as Strawson argue that the emergence of macroexperience from basic microexperience is less mysterious and more plausible than the emergence of experience from nonexperience; but in order not to end up with some form of the latter, they cannot help but make the absurd, utterly implausible claim that experiences and subjects of experience have always existed since the first instant of time after the Big Bang. Believe it if you can—I can't!

[Felix]

Greta: Still, imagining bliss in a microbe is a tad tricky!

Oh, I don't know, they probably don't feel separate at all from their environment. I've noticed they tend to have very small egos... very, very small.

[Count Lucanor]

I believe this post will also answer Count Lucanor's question. ..
I start with the certainty that I do have mental state. I know I have beliefs and desires and emotions. I just can't get from the certainty of mental states to the concept that all mental states are actually just brain chemistry. It seems to me that if I think, "I know I feel like I believe X, but that's actually just my brain chemicals doing their stuff", then those mental states lose their reality. I could be wrong, but I don't see how it could be the case that everything reduces to the physical, and mental states are real. I see that as a serious problem for physicalism.

I think there's a common misconception of mental states as pure abstract content, accidentally but not essentially tied to bodily processes, in other words, that mental states are not experiential states. That can hardly pass as substance monism.

I don't see what would be the problem with "brain chemicals doing their stuff" if those chemicals are just one part of a complex process involving multiple systems and components of a living organism, including (but not reduced to) the sense organs.

I believe it's very possible that consciousness itself is a basic property of our universe, while Consul rejects that possibility. I just don't see how one can reject the idea that consciousness is a basic property and also claim that mental states are real.

The universe may contain consciousness as a glass of water contains water, but it doesn't mean that an essential constituent of the glass is water, just the same as consciousness is not an essential constituent of the universe. Mental, experiential states are real, and that does not contradict the materialistic nature of the universe.