Consciousness Is Not Physical
Physical science is exclusively concerned with behaviour. Physics tells us, for example, that electrons have mass and charge, and these properties are exclusively defined in terms of behaviour, things like attraction, repulsion, and resistance to acceleration. It’s all about what stuff does. As I like to put it, doing physical science is like playing chess when you don’t care what the pieces are made of; you just care what they do, so you can play the game. At higher levels, atoms, molecules, and chemical elements of various forms and either defined in terms of behaviour or defined in terms of the more fundamental components, which are then ultimately cashed out in behavioural terms of fundamental physics.
If consciousness can be fitted into that picture, then it must be because consciousness is also all about behaviour. Crucially, this doesn’t just mean feelings and experiences cause behaviour – few would deny, for example, that pain causes avoidance behaviour. The physicalist must accept a more radical claim: that having feelings and experiences wholly consists in behaviour – for someone to feel pain is just for them to behave in a certain way, or to have their parts behave a certain way. This is not “behaviourism” in the old-school sense of defining mental states in terms of sensory inputs and behaviour outputs. But it is “behaviourism” in a broader sense that involves internal behaviour of bits of the brain as they form complex causal networks. Galen Strawson calls it “neo-behaviourism,” which I think captures it well.*
My favourite form of physicalism – illusionism – embraces this in a very honest way. In so far as we think consciousness is more than just patterns of behaviour, we are subject to an illusion. This week’s video on my channel is a 7-minute solo video of me explaining why I don’t think illusionism can be true, because it clashes with what we ordinarily mean when we talk about feelings and experience.
However, the more popular physicalist response involves a more subtle way of embracing neo-behaviourism. The mainstream physicalist doesn’t claim that we define consciousness in terms of behaviour – that’s too counterintuitive. Rather, their claim is that we define consciousness by, as it were, pointing inside ourselves. Mainstream physicalists think of introspection as an evolved capacity to track certain of our internal states. It’s then the job of science to find out what we’re tracking, and it turns out to be patterns of neural firings. By analogy, we define “water” or “lightening” by pointing at the phenomenon in question, and then scientists come along and tell us we’re pointing at H2O and electric discharge.
The problem is that introspection gives me rich understanding of what my feelings and experiences are. When I attend to my pain, I’m not just pointing inside myself: “That thing, whatever the hell it is.” A pain is essentially defined by how it feels, just as a triangle is essentially defined by having three sides. To the extent that I know how my pain feels, I know what my pain essentially is. Mainstream physicalists try avoid the counterintuitive claim of illusionists that “pain” is defined in terms of behaviour, but their own claim that when I talk about “pain” I’m just blindly pointing within myself is, to my mind, even more counterintuitive.
I’m going to set you some homework. Take a few moments to attend to one of your feelings. Then ask yourself the following two questions:
1. Do I have any positive understanding of what this feeling is, or am I just pointing inside myself at “something I know not what”?
2. In so far as introspection does furnish me with some understanding of what the feeling is, is it just a pattern of behaviour?
If you conclude that introspection reveals to you that pain is more than just a pattern of behaviour, then you have ruled out physicalism and you must turn to other options. I have heard panpsychism has a lot going for it.
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“Galileo’s Error” is my book on consciousness and panpsychism:
My book “Why? The Purpose of the Universe” explores the spiritual implications of panpsychism.
*The technical term is “functionalism”, but in my experience, this doesn’t convey to the public that it’s all about behaviour. I find people associated it with teleology, or that the relevant functions include “producing consciousness.”
The boundaries of reality themselves may need to be rethought. Consciousness does not have to occupy a reserved gap in an otherwise complete physical picture; it may instead belong within a more general framework of reality.
The introspection test is doing real work here, and I think it succeeds against illusionism and against the ostensive/functionalist move both — pain isn't a placeholder for "something, I know not what" and it isn't exhausted by what it does. But I'd push back gently on where that leaves us. The argument, as run, is really Russell's: physics gives us the relational skeleton of things and leaves their intrinsic nature open, and introspection is our one glimpse of that intrinsic nature from the inside.
Panpsychism is one way of populating that gap — put some flicker of the inside at every level, down to the electron.
But it isn't the only way, and it isn't obviously the most economical one. You could just as well say the inside appears only where structure is organized reflexively — where a system represents itself to itself — rather than smearing it across everything physics quantifies over. That keeps your entire argument intact (physicalism still can't be the whole story, introspection still reveals something behaviour can't capture) without asking anyone to grant electrons a point of view. The homework rules out physicalism. It doesn't, on its own, rule in panpsychism over a more restrictive Russellian monism.