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Under Physicalism, your physical head is a real thing, a real object of

the real world. Therefore, it can contain other things. And so it is that,

under Physicalism, the contents of your perception are contained by your

head. But under Idealism, the ‘physical’ world is not the real world; it is

instead a cognitive representation thereof. Now, your head is part of this

‘physical’ world. Therefore, it is also a cognitive representation, not a

real thing that can contain other things. Your head, as perceived, is an

icon on the computer desktop, a dial indication on the dashboard, not a

real thing. This way, your head doesn’t contain your mental activity;

instead, it is a representation thereof. This is why, under Analytic

Idealism, the contents of perception are not inside your head.

Let us again try a metaphor to clarify this. Imagine that we are having

a video call online. You are in your home, and I am in mine. But you can

see my head on your phone’s screen. Well, not quite: you can see an

image of my head on your screen, a representation of my head in the

form of colorful pixels. Would you then say that this image of my head

contains my thoughts? Of course not; pixels don’t contain thoughts;

images are mere representations, not containers. The best you could say

is that the image in some sense represents my thoughts, or is correlated

with my thoughts in some manner (e.g., through my facial expressions,

as represented on your phone’s screen).

Now, in exactly the same way, under Analytic Idealism my actual

head—the ‘physical’ entity you could see and touch if you were right in

front of me—is but an image, a representation of my individual mind,

pixels. In other words, my head is part of what my mind looks like when

you measure and then represent it on your internal dashboard. As a

‘physical’ entity, my head doesn’t contain my thoughts; instead, it is part

of what my thoughts—and the rest of my mental inner life—look like

when represented on a dashboard. Do you see the difference?

Representations don’t contain anything, for the same reason that the

pixels representing my head on your phone’s screen don’t contain my

thoughts. Representations just, well, represent things. That my head is

made of tiny atoms or elementary subatomic particles means only that

such ‘physical’ representations are, ultimately, also pixelated; just as an

image on your phone’s screen is pixelated.

Ergo, under Analytic Idealism your head does not contain the world

of your perceptions; it’s the world of your perceptions that contains your

head, insofar as your head is a perceived entity. And this is, in fact,

exactly what our natural intuition tells us: our heads are in the ‘physical’

world, not the ‘physical’ world in our heads. It’s so obvious it’s almost

embarrassing.

Amazingly, thus, casual physicalists attribute to Idealism precisely

one of the most counterintuitive aspects of their own metaphysics

(namely, that the world of perception is inside our head), while

attributing to Physicalism one of the most intuitive aspects of Idealism

(namely, that the world of perception is not inside our head, but our head

in the world of perception). It’s quite an ironic cultural game of bait-and-

switch.

The discussion about Analytic Idealism above is a bit of a digression, in

that I am still to elaborate much more carefully on what Analytic

Idealism is, what it entails and implies, why you should take it seriously,

etc. This will come in later chapters. But I am deliberately dropping hints

and partial characterizations of Analytic Idealism as I go along for two

reasons: first, to slowly acclimatize you to a different perspective, a

different way of thinking about reality; and second, to immediately

establish contrasts between mainstream Physicalism and Idealism, so to

constantly highlight to you the importance of being critical about

metaphysics in general, and Physicalism in particular.

There is one more thing mainstream Physicalism has going for it; one

that is particularly pernicious: mainstream media bias, especially the

science media. I am not suggesting conspiracies of any form here, and I

don’t believe there is any (frankly, I don’t think the people involved are

clever enough to pull off such a thing). What happens is much more

banal: good-old human insecurity, laziness, opportunism, careerism,

disregard for ethics, and, of course, stupidity.

As I mentioned earlier, research has consistently shown—for over a

decade, with results reproduced by many different research groups, using

a variety of psychedelic substances and imaging instruments—that

psychedelics only reduce brain activity, not increasing it anywhere in the

brain beyond measurement error margins. I have discussed and

documented this ad nauseam, in multiple publications, such as my

Scientific American article with Prof. Edward F. Kelly, titled

“Misreporting and Confirmation Bias in Psychedelic Research” (2018),

as well as Chapter 27 of my earlier book, Science Ideated (2021).

But if you were to read a report published on CNN on April 13, 2016

—titled “This is your brain on LSD, literally” and authored by journalist

James Griffiths—you would have found the following statement:

“Images of the brain under a hallucinogenic state showed almost the

entire organ lit up with activity ... The visual cortex became much more

active with the rest of the brain” (my emphasis). However, the scientific

paper covered in this report—namely, “Neural correlates of the LSD

experience revealed by multimodal neuroimaging,” by Robin Carhart-

Harris et al.—stated no such thing. Not only that, it showed precisely the

opposite: that brain activity decreases across the brain, and across

frequency bands, in the psychedelic state induced by LSD. How can the

science media report precisely the opposite of what the study has found?

A key illustration in the scientific paper depicts a brain with regions

highlighted in yellow, orange, and red. But what those colors mean is an

increase in resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) across brain

areas, in the psychedelic state. In other words, brain activity is reduced

across the brain with LSD, but the residual activity that is left exhibits

relatively more correlation across different brain areas. The journalist

reporting on the study, however, seems to have neglected to read the

figure’s captions, thereby reporting what he thought he was looking at,

which happens to have been precisely the opposite of what the study

found. I have publicly called for a correction of this report multiple

times, not only towards CNN but also towards the study’s authors, who I

think have the ethical responsibility to at least try to correct

misrepresentations of their work by the media. Nonetheless, as I write

these words, almost exactly seven years later, the appallingly incorrect

report is still to be found on CNN’s website.

But this is just the beginning. Reporting on the exact same study, the

Guardian newspaper in the UK—in a report titled “LSD’s impact on the

brain revealed in groundbreaking images,” by Ian Sample, science editor

of the Guardian, on April 11, 2016—reproduced a version of the very

figure in question, but with one twist: all references to RSFC—i.e.,

references that explain what the figure means—were removed. Instead,

the Guardian added the following caption: “A second image shows

different sections of the brain, either on placebo, or under the influence

of LSD (lots of orange).” As a reader, you cannot know what “lots of

orange” mean, unless the original figure caption had been reproduced, or

replaced with running text. And when you see a brain under LSD

depicted with ‘lots more orange’ than a brain under placebo, you are

bound to conclude that LSD lights up the brain like a Christmas tree. Yet

the opposite is what was actually found.

The CNN report, in fact, reproduces the exact same figure, edited in

the exact same way, so as to remove references to RSFC. Both CNN and

the Guardian credit Imperial College London as the source of the image.

It is impossible for me to determine which party actually edited the

original to remove the references. But if the science institution in

question is responsible for the, well, ‘simplification’ of the figure, I am

being unfair to the media and the problem is a lot more alarming than I

thought at first. Be that as it may, as of this writing both reports are still

online.

Two years earlier, the same group from Imperial College London had

published another paper on the neuroscience of the psychedelic state:

“Enhanced repertoire of brain dynamical states during the psychedelic

experience,” by Enzo Tagliazucchi et al. (2014). That study found that,

in the psychedelic state, brain activity variability increases in dream-

related areas. In other words, although brain activity decreases in the

psychedelic state—which many other studies have shown ad nauseam—

the residual activity left behind varies more. The difference between

activity and activity variability is entirely analogous to that between

speed and acceleration: the latter is the first derivative of the former; they

are not the same thing.

To produce this result, the study did a power spectrum analysis of the

brain activity signal read out by brain imaging instruments. Technically,

we say that such an analysis happens in the frequency domain. And

because it does not preserve phase information, one cannot transpose the

conclusions to the time domain. To put it less technically, the study was

such that no statements could be made about the amplitude of the brain

activity signal in time, which could otherwise have shown how much

brain activity there was. All the study could say is whether that activity

—however high or low it might be—varies more under psychedelics. I

am going through the trouble of explicitly naming the technical issues

here because I want to impress upon you that, as someone with a

background in electronics engineering, I understand the signal

processing science behind the study very well; it’s rather straightforward

stuff for anyone who studied electronic communications.

But several media outlets reported on this study by stating that it

found brain activity increases in dream-related areas of the brain, in the

psychedelic state. For instance, the Washington Post—in a report titled

“Psychedelic mushrooms put your brain in a ‘waking dream,’ study

finds,” by journalist Rachel Feltman, on July 3, 2014—stated: “After

injections, the 15 participants were found to have increased brain

function in areas associated with emotion and memory” (my emphasis).

They then went ahead and quoted study coauthor (!) Robin Carhart-

Harris in an interview as having said: “You’re seeing these [dream-

related] areas getting louder, and more active” (my emphasis). And: “It’s

like someone’s turned up the volume there, in these regions that are

considered part of an emotional system in the brain. When you look at a

brain during dream sleep, you see the same hyperactive emotion centers”

(my emphasis). But the scientific paper says nothing of the kind; it says

only that activity variability increases in dream-related areas of the brain,

not activity per se; the methodology of the study makes it structurally

impossible to extract conclusions about the latter.

I immediately e-mailed the paper’s authors seeking clarification. In

private e-mail correspondence, first-author Enzo Tagliazucchi confirmed

to me, in writing, that I was correct. Involved in the correspondence,

Carhart-Harris acknowledged that he indeed had misunderstood the

conclusions of the study. I find this plausible, as Carhart-Harris doesn’t

seem to have a background in signal processing, and the technical issues

involved can be tricky for a layperson. Nonetheless, I fully expected that

he and Tagliazucchi would promptly issue public corrections, since the

incorrect statements were prominently featured by the media and

scientific integrity demanded decisive action. But no such correction has

ever been made, despite my publicly calling for it repeatedly over the

years.

Not only that, Carhart-Harris penned a popular science essay on the

science blog The Conversation, where he insists on the error: “psilocybin

increased the amplitude (or ‘volume’) of activity in regions of the brain

that are reliably activated during dream sleep” (my emphasis), he wrote.

This is flat-out and unreservedly false: amplitude can only be determined

in time-domain analyses, not from a power spectrum lacking phase

information (technically, without phase information one cannot know

whether the frequency components interfere constructively or

destructively with one another, in the time domain). As I write these

words, in 2023, one could still find this quote in his essay “Magic

mushrooms expand your mind and amplify your brain’s dreaming areas –

here’s how,” published on July 3, 2014.

He has argued by e-mail that the word ‘activity’ is ambiguous and,

therefore, could be interpreted as activity variability. I believe this is

brazenly false and insisting on it is, at the very least, irresponsibly and

gratuitously misleading; for any educated reader will read ‘activity’ as,

well, activity. Moreover, later in the very same essay, Carhart-Harris

does use the word ‘activity’ in the correct, normal sense: “Our first study,

published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2012,

revealed decreases in brain activity after injection of psilocybin” (my

emphasis). What the paper cited shows is a proper reduction in activity,

not activity variability. It therefore continues to baffle me that, almost a

decade later, none of these errors—including those in an essay penned by

Carhart-Harris himself—have been corrected.

It gets worse. A few years later, in a social media exchange in which

I, once again, publicly called on the authors to issue corrections, Enzo

Tagliazucchi stated that it was me who misunderstood the implications of

their signal analysis, mistaking frequency-domain for time-domain

conclusions. He wrote on X, then known as Twitter: “We had a long time

ago the same discussion when you confused changes in BOLD activity

levels with changes in BOLD variance” (this tweet, published at 6:26

PM CET on October 27, 2018, is still online as of this writing).

Astonishingly, Tagliazucchi was accusing me of the very error his

coauthor Carhart-Harris had made towards the media, which I had

pointed out to them four years earlier! This, of course, prompted me to

immediately publish the full record of the correspondence we had had on

the topic, on my personal blog, under the title “Setting the record straight

with Robin Carhart-Harris and Enzo Tagliazucchi,” on October 28, 2018.

I do not believe that malice was involved in any of the original errors

(though I reserve judgment about the continuing unwillingness of the

people in question to publicly correct those mistakes). I believe that

Carhart-Harris honestly misunderstood the signal analysis that his own

colleague had performed and reported. I also believe that Tagliazucchi

sincerely misremembered who was confused about what. Yet, how could

he not only misremember something so simple, but invert the facts? How

could Carhart-Harris communicate towards the mainstream media, with

obvious confidence and authoritativeness, something he had not

understood at all—because he lacks the background—and should have

known better? Here’s your answer: since Physicalism has to be right—

we all know it is right, don’t we?—it must have been the case that brain

activity increased in dream-related areas; for this is exactly what

physicalists would have expected to see, due to the similarities between

psychedelic and dream states. The fact that the study’s methodology

cannot—and was never meant to—measure the amplitude of brain

activity played a minor de facto role in face of such powerful theoretical

prejudices. Moreover, since non-physicalists are always wrong—we all

know that too, don’t we?—it must have been Bernardo Kastrup who got

confused about the methodology four years prior, not a physicalist

coauthor of the very study in question.

In science we call this ‘confirmation bias,’ this case being, in my

opinion, a spectacular and grotesquely sustained instance thereof. This is

why I considered it worthy of recounting in detail: it makes the otherwise

abstract notion of confirmation bias very concrete; it brings it to life in

all its rawness. Had I not told you about these specific, real-life facts, I

might have left you with the impression that my claims about

confirmation bias are merely vague, generic, unsubstantiated, and

perhaps even biased themselves. But with concrete, living examples,

such as the above, I hopefully could impress upon you the alarming

reality of confirmation bias.

More generally, confirmation bias means this: when you expect

certain results or conclusions with deep but unexamined and uncritical

confidence, you will see—and therefore report—what you expect to see,

regardless of what is actually in front of your eyes. You will also design

your experiments to find what you expect to find, as opposed to what is

there to be found. Finally, you will do your statistical analysis so as to

carve out and highlight what you expect to be the case, and filter out

more significant effects that you consider a priori impossible. You may

even read into your results—and thereafter communicate to the press—

what you believe they should imply, instead of what they actually imply.

And once you are publicly caught in this web, it becomes difficult to

disentangle yourself from it without harm to your reputation and career;

the only perceived option is to double-down. Therefore, errors are

perpetuated; no one corrects anything; one just hides behind precarious

and lamentable language games, such as the notion that the word

‘activity’ is so ambiguous as to mean variability, or functional

connectivity, or entropy, or whatever else you find increasing in the brain

under psychedelics. Under the pretext of making things ‘simpler and

easier for intellectually stunted science journalists,’ crucial details are

omitted in press materials, which allow for a result that clearly

contradicts physicalist expectations to be misinterpreted—and then

misreported—as corroborating these expectations. This is the world we

live in. The confirmation bias injected into science by the metaphysics of

Physicalism is probably the most powerful there has ever been.

But I don’t want to leave you with the impression that the problem is

localized and contained. So I shall give you one more example. In a 2014

scientific paper titled “Homological scaffolds of brain functional

networks,” by G. Petri et al., researchers tried to illustrate how the

correlations across residual activity in different brain areas increase

under psychedelics (even though activity itself decreases). To do this,

they used graphs with linked nodes, different nodes representing

different brain areas, and the links representing the correlations between

the respective areas. They then applied successively lower thresholds of

correlation for drawing the links, until enough links—whatever ‘enough’

means in this case—were visible in the graph. This, of course, created

the arguably artificial and misleading appearance that the brain under

psychedelics exhibits dramatically increased global connectivity.

In all fairness to the researchers, in the scientific paper they warn that

the graphs are but “simplified cartoons,” encouraging caution in their

interpretation. However, these same graphs were subsequently used, with

no such qualification, by respected journalist Michael Pollan in his book

How to Change Your Mind (Penguin, 2018) as the primary ‘evidence’ for

a physicalist interpretation of the results. Puzzlingly, Pollan barely

mentions the far more impressive and direct measurements of decreased

brain activity reported in multiple other studies. In how many other

popular science books, newspaper reports, and magazine essays, do you

think confirmation biases such as this can be found? And how many of

them pass for perfectly good and trustworthy science material?

The problem here is not theoretical or abstract; it’s becoming

increasingly more concrete and alarming as we transition from Internet

search engines to AI queries, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot.

Indeed, traditionally, when using the Internet to find an answer to some

question, we did so through search engines like Google. We knew that

many search results were questionable, unreliable, or even flat-out

malicious, and thus proceeded with caution. We took responsibility for

finding the correct answer, for we knew that doing so depended on the

quality of our search and our ability to critically evaluate the results. We

didn’t expect that Google would always give us truth; we knew it

couldn’t do that.

But as we begin to abandon search engines and pose, instead,

questions to AI chatbots in natural language, our psychology leads us to

believe the answers produced by the chatbot as if they were truths

pronounced by an all-knowing oracle who understands what it is saying.

The reason is that we no longer see search engine results; we no longer

see the sources of the information being conveyed to us. Instead, we see

a human-like answer on the screen, as if an authoritative professor were

verbally elucidating the issue. And since often that answer is true, we

slowly let our guard down and drift towards trusting all answers

uncritically. This is similar to how we slowly drift towards trusting

autonomous driving software, even if in the beginning we feel rather

edgy about letting go of the steering wheel. The result is that we lose our

ability to be critical of the answers and begin to believe in fallacious and

even malicious material.

Linking this back to our discussion on media bias: AI chatbots collect

the information they provide you with by crawling the Internet. They

will look at magazine articles, blogs, news reports, etc., so to find the

information you are looking for. And when those sources are biased and

wrong, so will the answers the chatbots give you. For chatbots, despite

being considered instances of ‘artificial intelligence,’ in fact have no

understanding of what they are saying; none whatsoever. They are

merely natural language interfaces to search engines. As such, even if

their algorithms favor sources with high credibility scores—such as

CNN, the Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, and the academic blog The

Conversation, all of which are much more credible than your neighbor’s

social media feed—the nonsense will still make its way to you, because

of reporting biases at the highest echelons of academia and journalism. It

is crucial for our future as a society that we understand this.

To test my own point above, I decided to ask ChatGPT a question (in

May 2023): “Do psychedelics increase brain activity?” ChatGPT’s

answer: “Yes, psychedelics can increase brain activity ... [they] can lead

to increased activity in ... the default mode network (DMN) ... It should

be noted that while psychedelics can increase brain activity in certain

regions, they can also lead to decreased activity in other regions. For

example, research has shown that psychedelics can decrease activity in

the default mode network” (my emphasis). Obviously, this answer cannot

be correct, as it is internally contradictory; and it is so in a very specific

—not a merely generic—manner. Clearly, ChatGPT has no

understanding of what it is saying; it simply provides a natural language

interface to search results. In reality, research has consistently shown that

psychedelics reduce brain activity, primarily and precisely in the Default

Mode Network. Where do you think ChatGPT’s ‘confusion’ comes from?

AI chatbots are not intelligent in any way remotely akin to how you

and I are intelligent. AI chatbots do not understand anything; they just

collect and present information in natural language format; they reword

back to us what is written out there in the wilds of the Internet. So when

the media reports on scientific results in an inaccurate, biased manner—

or worse, when the researchers themselves do so—those errors and

biases are incorporated into our cultural database; the ‘oracle’ that the

vast majority of the population will be consulting to inform their lives for

the next decades. This is perhaps the biggest thing Physicalism will have

going for it in the future.

But there is more. The psychedelic science cases of media and

confirmation bias discussed above are particularly appalling, but

countless seemingly innocent instances of the same bias are happening

literally every day. Let us take memory, for instance: a core premise of

Physicalism is that memory is information physically stored somewhere

in the brain, just as your files are physically stored in your computer’s

main storage drive. This premise has a scientific implication: we should

be able to find memory information in physical brain states.

Science has been trying to find this secret information storage for

well over a century, with results that often contradict the physicalist

premise. For instance, in 2013 researchers reported on an amazing study:

little aquatic flatworms called ‘planaria’—which have the remarkable

ability to regrow amputated body parts, including their head—were

trained to navigate an irregular surface to find food. The researchers then

decapitated the planaria—thereby removing their neurons, which are in

their head—and waited for two weeks until a new head grew. With a

brand-new head in place, the planaria maintained their originally trained

ability to navigate the rough surfaces to find their food, without

additional training. Somehow the planaria remembered their training

even after their head was severed, contradicting the premise that

memories are physically stored in (networks of) neurons. After all, if you

throw your computer’s main storage drive away, you will not expect that

the brand-new one you just bought will automatically have all of your

old files in it. The research in question has been published in the paper

“An automated training paradigm reveals long-term memory in

planarians and its persistence through head regeneration,” by Tal

Shomrat and Michael Levin, published in the Journal of Experimental

Biology in October 2013.

But I digress. The point I am trying to make is not per se that

Physicalism is wrong when it comes to memories—though it clearly is—

but that scientific results about memories are reported inaccurately and

with bias in favor of Physicalism. To see this, let us take a press release

put out on September 10, 2008, by UCLA Health: “How memories are

made, and recalled.” The press release ambitiously claims that “scientists

at UCLA and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel have recorded

individual brain cells in the act of calling up a memory, thus revealing

where in the brain a specific memory is stored and how the brain is able

to recreate it” (my emphasis). But when one actually reads the technical

paper, a very different picture emerges.

Here’s what the researchers did: having instrumented subjects with

electrodes to record neuronal activity, they asked the subjects to watch

short video clips. They then recorded the patterns of neuronal firings

during the experience of watching the video clips. Some time later, the

subjects were asked to remember what they had watched. Their patterns

of brain activation were recorded again. Lo and behold, roughly the same

patterns of neuronal firings were observed during the primary experience

and the recall of the experience.

Is this result at all surprising? We have known for a long time that

many types of subjective experience correlate with specific patterns of

brain activation (except, of course, psychedelic states, syncope,

hyperventilation states, brain damage associated with acquired savant

syndrome, states of cardiac arrest, etc.; but I digress again). Therefore,

insofar as the experiences of watching a video clip and recalling the

video clip are qualitatively similar, of course the associated patterns of

neuronal activation should be similar; duh. This says precisely nothing

about the supposed physical mechanisms underlying memory.

The relevant question here is this: how does the brain know which

neurons to reactivate during the recall experience? How does it

remember which neurons were active during the original experience of

watching the video? Where is the information stored, and later retrieved,

which tells the brain which neurons to reactivate during recall? That’s

what would say something about where memories are stored in the brain.

But the study says nothing about it. That the same neurons go active

during recall is at least largely irrelevant to elucidating how the brain

knows which ones to reactivate. The press release’s claim—a UCLA

press release, mind you—that researchers revealed where in the brain a

specific memory is stored is unjustified. Indeed, it takes some very

charitable imagination jiu-jitsu to figure out a sense in which the claim

can relate to the actual experiment.

But we live in an age where doing science is a career job, and

research institutions fight tooth-and-nail for funding. Scientists go

through performance appraisals every year. Funding and careers can only

be secured if visible and relevant progress is made and announced to the

world with great fanfare. So people and institutions have every

motivation to exaggerate and mislead when communicating to society at

large, to highlight the great progress and relevance of their results;

without it, there may be less funding and less jobs next year. And since

the foundational metaphysical assumption of our culture is Physicalism,

the exaggerations and biases consistently toe the line of Physicalism;

otherwise, they would attract the wrong kind of attention and scrutiny.

Nobody wants that.

Still on the topic of memory, another research group announced, in

2009, the discovery that memory storage may be associated with the

interplay between synaptic activity and DNA transcription in the nucleus

of neurons (see “Reducing memory to a molecule: A researcher explores

the molecular essence of memory,” by M. Hendricks, Johns Hopkins

Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences). A 2012 study, on the other

hand, discovered that memories may be encoded digitally in neuronal

microtubules—structures in the neuronal cytoplasm, not in the nucleus

(see “Cytoskeletal signaling: Is memory encoded in microtubule lattices

by CaMKII phosphorylation?” by T.J. Craddock et al., published in

PLoS Computational Biology). Yet another 2012 study announced the

discovery that memories may be stored as patterns of inter-neuron

synaptic connections in the hippocampus (see “Synaptic conditions for

auto-associative memory storage and pattern completion,” by E.Y. Cheu

et al., in the Journal of Computational Neuroscience). All these studies

claimed fundamental scientific advancements confirming the physicalist

premise that memories are stored physically in the brain. The only

problem is: the conclusions are mutually contradictory.

Don’t get me wrong: there are true and relevant scientific discoveries

in probably most of these studies. The problem is that, to highlight their

relevance, broad metaphysical claims are made that are often entirely

unsubstantiated by the results. For instance, researchers often fail to

distinguish memory pathways—i.e., neuronal mechanisms correlated

with memory access—from memory storage. If a person becomes

unable to recall short-term memories because of damage to certain areas

of the brain, maybe ‘physical’ structures correlated with memory access

have been compromised, not memory storage itself (otherwise, the well-

known phenomenon of ‘terminal lucidity’—look it up—wouldn’t be

possible). But alas, this kind of careful and rigorous reasoning is all but

absent when it comes to the science media and the press offices of

research institutions. The result is a circus of misleading, biased, and

sometimes flat-out false claims being pumped out to and by the media, in

an effort to successfully compete in the funding—and career—

marketplace.

If you are a casual educated reader simply going over the latest

science headlines, you are bound to come away convinced that the

physicalist premise that memories are stored physically in the brain has

been scientifically proven over and over again. Here are a couple of the

headlines published in association with the studies mentioned above:

“Reducing memory to a molecule,” “Scientists claim brain memory code

cracked,” and so on. So many times will you have read similar headlines,

claiming major advances in pinning down the physical location and

mechanisms of recall, you just won’t think it possible that they are all

wrong. Yet, as far as metaphysics is concerned, they more than likely

are, not least due to the fact that the claims are mutually contradictory.

The issue is that Physicalism, for being mainstream, provides a cover of

protection for journalists and scientists alike: if you interpret and report

results along physicalist lines, you are less likely—or so the calculation

goes—to go wrong and be punished for it than if you dare to contradict

the mainstream narrative. The latter will attract critical scrutiny, put you

on the defensive, motivate scorn by your colleagues (who are competing

against you for that promotion or that funding, and will smell blood the

moment you hint at a non-physicalist position), entice the public ire of

big-mouthed pundits who do no science but make a career of talking

about it, dramatically reduce your chances of getting a paper or report

published, and so on. At the very least, it will triple the amount of work

you will need to do to defend your point. In a newsroom, the difference

between safely cowering under physicalist cover or critically questioning

it is that of having your report published immediately, or seeing it

escalated to management, scrutinized meeting after meeting, having

more work demanded of you, and all this for a much higher risk of

rejection.

If you go with Physicalism and err, you will be forgiven, for how

could anyone have imagined that things aren’t quite like Physicalism

predicts, right? But if you go against it and err, God help you; you will

be branded a nut with untrustworthy judgment and face an immediate

career glass-ceiling. Therefore, if you have big career ambitions and less

big commitments to ethics, you may calculate that it’s best to confirm

general expectations, even when you know that you are misleading the

public and misrepresenting your own results. People willing to do so are

the ones who stand the greatest chance of finding themselves in

influential and well-paid positions—department heads, chair professors,

and whatnot—for obvious reasons. Universities and news organizations

compete in an arena where schmoozing with power is king, and power is

older; power is old-fashioned; power is physicalist. Ergo, firing a shot

against it is akin to shooting yourself in the foot. It takes great

intellectual, scientific, and journalistic integrity to objectively pursue

reason and evidence in a rigorous manner, whatever the cost. Alas, such

level of integrity appears to be rare. The more popular calculation seems

to be that it’s best to err on the side of Physicalism. This is what

perpetuates our current metaphysical insanity like a self-fulfilling

prophecy, to the point that—scandalously—the very opposite of the true

findings is what sometimes gets reported.

Clearly, thus, despite being the worst metaphysics on the table today—

the most internally inconsistent to the point of incoherence, the most

empirically inadequate, having the weakest explanatory power, etc.—

culturally speaking Physicalism has a lot going for it: a perceived (and

self-fulfilling) lack of rational alternatives, the prevalence of unexamined

physicalist assumptions leading to widespread question-begging, the

delusion that Physicalism underpins science and technology

methodologically, the vagueness and resulting unfalsifiability of

Physicalism, general public ignorance of what is entailed and implied by

Physicalism, and brazen confirmation bias in science and the media in

favor of Physicalism. This is why it continues to dominate our culture,

despite its untenability being so self-evident and overwhelming to those

who care to look a little closer. But who will have the time and

background to look closer, unless they are a philosopher specialized in

the subject? Who will be able to muster the required energy and

discipline, in late evening hours after arriving home from a tiring day at

work, to critically study the relevant, often highly technical literature?

And thus the colorful carnival wheel of metaphysical drivel, ironically

cladded in the garments of science and reason, continues to go merrily

round.

Chapter 5

The remedy is worse than the disease

In his Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1837), Georg Hegel

introduced into the Western mind the idea of historical evolution, the

notion that humanity somehow progresses in the course of time,

advances, gets better in some significant sense, steadily minimizing

some error or cost function. Charles Darwin latched onto the underlying

intuition in his own On the Origin of the Species (1859)—indeed, as

Friedrich Nietzsche stated in The Joyful Wisdom (1882), “without Hegel,

no Darwin”—and cemented steady evolution as one of the most

powerful, fertile, and consequential ideas in Western thought. Early 20th

-

century Positivism, Marxism, Scientism, New Thought, etc., all have

their inception in this now deeply ingrained intuition of linear,

monotonic increases in human insight.

Never mind that Thomas Kuhn already comprehensively demolished

such a naïve and arbitrary idea in his seminal book, The Structure of

Scientific Revolutions (1962), and that Carl Jung already provided a

more empirically adequate model of the dynamics of our epistemology—

namely, ‘circumambulation’—than linear evolution: today, we still like

to regard all mainstream scientific and philosophical developments since

the Enlightenment as linear steps forward. Even if earlier Enlightened

models or ideas turn out to be false, we find ways to regard them as

merely incomplete steps that, nonetheless, played a positive role in

opening the doors to a deeper understanding.

Allow me to belabor this point a bit, for it is crucial to our

understanding of ourselves, and of how we go about the business of

metaphysics. We like to see our errors as things we can build upon; we

like to conjure up and attribute value to all our endeavors, even when

they turn out to be just silly. Our psychology has made it extremely

challenging for us to recognize that, sometimes, we are just flat-out

wrong and that’s all there is to it. It makes us uncomfortable to think that

certain ideas we’ve adopted as a culture were just a royal waste of time

that led to nothing. We feel the need to validate even our worst missteps,

because in doing so we validate ourselves; we get that warm and fuzzy

feeling that our efforts somehow always lead to something of value,

incomplete as they may be.

As the obvious shortcomings of mainstream Physicalism begin to

erode the confidence of even the most prejudiced and pigheaded

intellectual elites, the need to regard it as incomplete—as opposed to just

silly—is now reaching overwhelming levels. And so it is that, since the

late 1980s or so, an effort has been underway in academia to reframe

Physicalism as a merely insufficient step in the right direction. This effort

goes by the name of ‘Micro-Constitutive Panpsychism’—or simply

Panpsychism, as I shall call it henceforth.

There are two different formulations of Panpsychism. I’ll first discuss

their differences and then elaborate on what they have in common.

The first formulation is the notion that elementary subatomic

particles (henceforth simply ‘fundamental particles’), in addition to

physical properties such as mass, charge and momentum, also have

fundamental experiential properties. In this view, experience is simply

added as an extra property of matter, next to the other known ones.

The second formulation of Panpsychism, on the other hand, states

that experience is the intrinsic nature of fundamental particles; that is,

what we call a fundamental particle essentially is experience, which then

manifests itself outwardly, through interaction with other fundamental

particles, in the form of the other known properties, such as mass,

charge, momentum, etc.

Notice that these two formulations really are different. In the first

case experience is simply another property of matter, while in the second

case matter is experience. Yet, their underlying spirit is the same. Indeed,

what makes both formulations panpsychist—as opposed to idealist—is

this: in both cases, the structure of experience—i.e., of subjectivity itself

—is supposed to be the structure of the distribution of fundamental

particles across space and time. In both cases, the world is constituted

by these fundamental particles, which, in turn, are the carriers and

subjects of experience. Therefore, the way the particles arrange

themselves in space and time is the way subjectivity arranges itself.

In addition, under both formulations of Panpsychism there is

something it feels like to be a fundamental particle; there is something it

feels like to be an electron, a quark, or a photon: electrons, quarks and

photons not only have standalone reality, they also are conscious in and

of themselves; each photon, each quark, each electron is a little

microscopic subject of experience, or ‘micro-subject.’ Our conscious

inner life is supposed to be the aggregate result of how these discrete

micro-subjects arrange themselves and interact with one another inside

our body. The micro-subjects constituting our brain somehow combine

with one another inside our skull to give rise to our seemingly unitary

subjectivity—i.e., to what it feels like to be us.

The motivation for Panpsychism is obvious: since mainstream

Physicalism has predictably failed to explain (qualitative) experience in

terms of (purely quantitative) physical stuff, the panpsychist just deems

the existence of experience to be a brute aspect of physicality that

requires no explanation; and presto, no more ‘hard problem of

consciousness’! The idea is to stick to the same irreducible, basic

building blocks of nature that mainstream Physicalism already

postulates. In the mind of the panpsychist, these basic building blocks

are the fundamental particles: microscopic little ‘marbles’ that have

equally irreducible properties—i.e., properties that cannot be explained

in terms of anything else. The panpsychist then simply postulates that

experiential states are either (a) just one more type of fundamental

property of the particles, essentially extrapolating the line already drawn

under Physicalism; or (b) the inner essence of the particles, which fills in

a hole left open by Physicalism.

The critique of Panpsychism that follows presupposes only what the

two formulations discussed above have in common. Therefore, I shall

henceforth no longer differentiate between them.

Notice that Panpsychism explains precisely nothing: it simply finds a

subterfuge to avoid the need for an explanation. If this were to be

considered a valid line of reasoning, then any vexing empirical

observation could be trivially ‘accounted for’ in the same manner: How

do we make sense of the fine-tuning of the universal constants? Well, it

is just a brute fact of physicality. How can we account for why people

with no risk factors still develop cancer? Well, it is just a brute fact of

physicality. And so on. Is this in the spirit of philosophical and scientific

inquiry? (If you think Analytic Idealism—for also considering

experience fundamental in nature—is guilty of the same sin, then read

on; I will tackle this question very explicitly later. For now, if you are so

inclined, you could try and think about it yourself, so we could compare

notes later.)