 Welcome to our afternoon session of the conference. That was a great morning. I'm excited about the afternoon. I'm Chris Bradford. I'm the vice president of the MTA, and I'll get to be our first speaker for this afternoon session. I'll be talking about the viability of panpsychism. A few years ago, I attended a conference at which a speaker claimed that no one could reasonably believe that they are a brain in a vat. And to illustrate his point, he asked audience members who believed they were a brain in a vat to raise their hands. Now my contrarian friend next to me, Lincoln Cannon, raised his hand much to the dismay of the speaker who was somewhat flustered. Now I don't think Lincoln really believes that he's a brain in a vat. He was just making a point of his disagreement that such a thing was unthinkable. I'm confident that there is something that truly is unthinkable. So would members of this audience who think they do not have mental experiences please raise their hands? Now of course this is a contradiction. We cannot deny that we have thoughts and subjective experience. The very act of denying requires mental experiences. Now some might want to claim that such things are illusory, but again the very concept of illusion itself requires mental experience and consciousness. Now consciousness may be too specific a term for the purposes of this paper, but mental experience is fundamental to our understanding of the universe. To deny mental experience is to deny that we can understand. Mental experience is the thing we are most certain about. In fact to be certain is to have mental experience. In his book Mind and Cosmos, Thomas Nagel asks a critical question. How can we understand the world in such a way as to explain this fundamental phenomenon of mind upon which all scientific endeavor rests? Now for the pursuit of science presupposes that the universe is thinkable. It's intelligible. A theory that fails to explain mind cannot be complete. Nagel notes that beginning with Descartes and the introduction of substance dualism the mental has been systematically excluded from modern physical science. Now this has provided great explanatory benefits in our understanding of many fundamental features of the world but it has resulted in a common world view in which mind is somehow ancillary, it's super-venient on the more fundamental physical aspects of the world. The substance dualist is at a loss to explain how the mind could play any role in a universe in which physical causes explain everything. In such a world view, the mental is either accidental which is epiphenomenalism which James Carroll critiqued well a couple of years ago at one of our conferences or it's miraculous caused by God from moment to moment which is a position known as occasionalism or set up by God in advance to seem as if the mental and the physical interact and this was Leipnitz's view which is called parallelism. And further as we delve into neurobiology and better understand the workings of the brain we're discovering that what we typically consider mental properties are strongly correlated to physical structure. For example, a man convicted of pedophilia complained of headaches while in prison. Upon examination doctors determined that he had a brain tumor and when the tumor was removed his inclination disappeared. Sometime after he had served as prison term this inclination to pedophilia started to return and he discovered that the tumor had begun to reoccur. Via Sramachandran and others have pioneered substantial research in neurobiological explanations for mental phenomena and substance dualism cannot provide a good explanation for these kinds of findings. Now there have been essentially three kinds of responses to the problems of dualism. They all rely on substance monism that is the denial that the mental and the physical are different substances. The first one is materialism or physicalism. Broadly speaking physicalism is the claim that all existence is physical in nature although the term physical is somewhat vague. Galen Strassen, a well-known philosopher now at the University of Texas at Austin claims that the predominant strain of physicalism denies the reality of the mental and he cites Daniel Dennett as an example and he calls this physics-alism essentially the idea that current physics is capable of describing all of reality. Now I agree with him that this is really an incoherent position. This is again the denial that we have mental experiences. Quoting from his book Strassen's Real Materialism and Other Essays this is because experience is itself the fundamental given natural fact. Its existence is evident and provably non-illusory. It is provably non-illusory because it's seeming to exist which very few deny is a sufficient condition of its actually existing. Experience is in fact the only concrete natural phenomenon that we know for certain to exist. A second approach is immaterialism or the idea that matter is illusory and only the mental exists. Max Planck, famous physicist in 1944 said as a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science to the study of matter I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much there is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind with a capital M. This mind is the matrix of all matter. Now this idea has much in common with occasionalism. The idea that this mind, essentially God brings about all matter and all we observe about it. The third approach is emergentism. And emergentism proposes that mental states emerge from physical states in much the same way that novel physical properties emerge from physical states. The classic analogy is the properties exhibited by water surface tension, fluidity, expansion upon freezing, etc. that are not properties of hydrogen and oxygen on their own but arise only when hydrogen and oxygen are combined in particular ways. Now there are two flavors of emergence strong or brute or radical emergence and in strong emergence these novel properties exhibited by the higher level order are not explainable in terms of the properties of the lower level order. Now this is not the case with water. The properties of the fluid can be explained in terms of the properties of the constituent atoms. And this is the second type which is called weak emergence which suggests that as in the case of water emergent properties can fully be explained in terms of the properties of the underlying structures. So are there good reasons to prefer one of these over another? So I've already discussed the flaws of the physicalism described by Strassen. The major problem with both immaterialism and strong emergence is that there is a premature abandoning of the quest for understanding by resorting to the supernatural something that is not explainable even in theory. Now it may well be that there are brute facts about the world that we cannot break down further in order to understand more fully but to the extent that we can pursue such ends we gain the advantage of additional explanatory power. Imagine if we answered every scientific question with God did it or that's just the way the world is we would not be satisfied with our understanding. Now with regard specifically to the difference between long emergence and weak emergence Nagel points out that the reductive approaches that is the attempt to explain phenomena in terms of constituent parts that require fewer assumptions tend to be fruitful and have greater explanatory power than the essentially mysterious assertion of brute emergence. Now additionally Mormons have a commitment to some kind of monism. Dr. Nacovitz 131 that Adam Miller quoted this morning there's no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter but it is more finer pure and can only be discerned by purer eyes. We cannot see it but when our bodies are purified we shall see that it is all matter. Even if we suppose there are two kinds of matter finer spirit matter and course or physical matter in some important sense it is all matter. The Catholic theologian Stephen Webb in his recent Mormon Christianity what non-Mormon Christians can learn from the Latter-day Saints claims that this commitment to materialism is the greatest strength of Mormon thought and makes Mormonism more compatible with the discoveries of modern science than most other religions. In fact I would suggest that this compatibility between a scientific worldview and Mormon cosmology is one of the primary reasons the MTA really exists. Now Galen Stross and I referred to him earlier published a very influential paper titled Realistic Monism Why Physicalism and Tales Panpsychism and he relies on the rejection of substance dualism and argues strongly for the incoherence of brute emergence to conclude quote, given that everything concrete is physical and that everything physical is constituted out of physical ultimates and that experience is a part of concrete reality panpsychism seems the only reasonable position more than just an inference to the best explanation continuing the quote so now I can say that physicalism i.e. real physicalism entails pan-experientialism or panpsychism all physical stuff is energy in one form or another and all energy itrow is an experience involving phenomenon this sounded crazy to me for a long time this is still Strossen speaking but I am quite used to it now that I know that there is no alternative short of substance dualism a view for which there has never been any good argument end quote panpsychism once the common view among quote unquote animistic peoples is regaining the ground that it lost in 19th century philosophy now thus far focused on the philosophical arguments around panpsychism but is it compatible with physics with what we know about the physical world now before I go there I want to acknowledge that you know Strossen says this idea may sound crazy I mean do elementary particles experience the world like you and I do I myself rejected panpsychism for some time because I couldn't fathom how a subatomic particle could support a rich consciousness like I experienced at least relatively rich however I've learned that almost no versions of panpsychism propose such a rich mental experience for elementary particles rather panpsychist theories acknowledge varying degrees of mental experience even to the point that we would not recognize the experiential properties of elements as similar to our own and David Chalmers calls this pan-proto-psychism Strossen calls it micro-psychism there is something analogous to our own experience in the fundamental nature of matter from which our experience can arise in theory explainable in terms of the more fundamental proto-experiential properties of matter spirit or physical matter so what might proto-psychism look like and here I want to turn to physics the mathematicians Simon Kochin and John Conway who is most well known for Conway's game of life published the free will theorem a few years ago demonstrating that if we assume that people have some limited free will given some basic premises some of which are derived from quantum mechanics the result is that elementary particles also must have some limited free will now Conway gave six one-hour lectures to explain this theorem and since my time is slightly more limited I'll attempt to give a very brief overview the full lectures are available at the link on the slide which will be available after this conference now Kochin and Conway's thought experiment is basically this arrange two entangled particles in space like separation and have two independent researchers measure the spin of the particles what we know about quantum mechanics and relativity proves that the entire past history of the universe is insufficient to explain the correlated behavior the researchers will observe in addition randomness can be mathematically excluded the result is that the particles are semi-free and we'll talk about that a little more to respond to the measurements of the researchers now this theorem relies on two premises derived from quantum mechanics the first they've called spin and this relies on a 1967 proof by Kochin one of the co-authors of this proof and a collaborator named Ernst Specker and this is called the Kochin-Specker paradox particles have a feature known in quantum mechanics a spin that can be measured on any axis of the particle in any direction and quantum mechanics predicts and it's been experimentally verified that spin measured in three mutually perpendicular directions in our three-dimensional space will always result in values of negative one zero and one so to simplify the math the values are squared resulting in two ones and a zero and what Kochin and Specker showed is that there is no set of values that can be pre-assigned to a particle to satisfy this rule and we'll show this for a minute so this first picture represents just a subset this is 33 possible axes that could be measured for a given particle so suppose we start looking at the right-hand side of this cube the green dot in the middle suppose we start with measuring that axis and we get a zero what we know from that is that in order to satisfy this rule any two other two perpendicular axes to that one must return a value of one so we can fill those in and those would be like those red ones sort of in the middle going across the top and the front of the cube and then from those we can then derive any perpendicular axes to those must be a zero and we can proceed around the axes just from taking our first result and walking around what must be the case but we run into a paradox this contradiction this yellow point on the right-hand side of the cube which previously in the previous picture had to be a one now as we go around and we look at all of the axes and we have to satisfy these conditions it has to be a zero and of course it can't be both a one and a zero there is no come possible set of values that will satisfy the requirement of quantum mechanics so this means one of two things either a the measurements are not history independent they depend on the history of the measurements actually made on the particle so when you measure the spin then it changes everything about the actual spin of the particle like in real time right or b the particle doesn't have a value for spin until it's measured and at that point it decides what answer it's going to give and so the remainder of this thought experiment serves to eliminate the first of those possibilities that is that you're actually changing the history of the particle and this is because they're taking two entangled particles and they're separating them so there's no way that information can pass between the two and yet you're going to get the same results each time and so what you cannot be that you're measuring this particle over here and consequently this particle over here is actually changing because there's no way to get information back and forth now there's a lot of mathematics behind this Conway does a very good job of talking about this I'm going to skip over a little bit more of the details of this article but that gives you the sense so what they've proven then mathematically they express the possible results of all the possible measurements that can be taken mathematically they included the shared history of these entangled particles everything before they were separated and their unique histories and they prove mathematically that the history of these particles everything in the universe within these particles light cones can be shown not to determine the outcome of the measurements the values can't be predetermined we've seen that because of the Kohen-Schpecker paradox the values can't be predetermined and they can't be influencing each other based on the history of what you're measuring the particles are actually deciding how to respond to the measurements in response to the free choices of the researchers now this is clearly a very limited idea of free will the idea that a particle can respond to a measurement with a value of zero or one but it may give us some way of thinking about what proto psychism might mean concepts and perception sensory experience emotions thought these are fundamental everything that matters about human life requires the mind and the most plausible explanation for the existence of experience is that it is built into the nature of the universe now what are some of the potential consequences of panpsychism one of them is that perhaps mental states could arise from all kinds of matter that is it's not necessarily restricted to the particular type of matter that we consist of being carbon based life forms because reductionism goes all the way down carbon and silicon and all the other elements they're all composed of the same kinds of elementary building blocks which must have some proto experiential properties that can give rise to mind and perhaps they could give rise to mind in other accretions second what we experience may be proto-mental from another perspective so much as we might call the mental experience of a goldfish proto-mental there may be some higher-order intelligence that would look at our mental experience and call it proto-mental from its perspective there also may be ethical consequences how do we view the world I mean think about we already have questions about how we treat apes dolphins pigs plants the earth in fact panpsychism may form a basis for all effects and morality if we deny the mental or the conscious then there's no foundation for morality and finally and perhaps most uniquely transhumanist we claim that biological evolution is being superseded by technological evolution guided by human thought Ray Kurzweil when asked by Bill Gates if he believes God exists responded that he believes God does not exist yet and speaks of a future universe infused with intelligence and spirit that would be in essence God the new God argument recognizes that if God will exist in the future it is highly improbable that God does not exist now we live in a universe infused with intelligence and to quote the doctrine of covenants intelligence cleaveth unto intelligence so that intelligence can be augmented to fill the universe with God and God's thank you