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ArgumentThe argument from intrinsic nature
Physics never says what matter is, only what it does: there is a blank left at the heart of matter, and experience is the one thing we know from within.
Supports
Strawson · "Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism" · 2006
- Physics describes matter solely by its structure, that is, by relations and effects: a mass is what resists acceleration, a charge what attracts and repels. Each term refers to another, never to what the thing is in itself.
- But relations do not stand on their own: something must sustain them, an intrinsic nature that physics leaves blank, not through oversight but by method, since what it measures is behaviour.
- Yet there is one thing in the world we do not know through its relations: our own experience, given to us directly, and which happens to be what a piece of matter, our brain, does. It is the only place where we hold a datum that is not relational.
- To make experience arise instead from a matter containing no trace of it would require an without precedent: elsewhere what emerges follows from the properties of the parts, whereas here an inside would have to be drawn from a pure outside.
Therefore So the intrinsic nature of matter is, at least in part, experiential: consciousness does not appear in the universe, it is composed within it, and ours is its most elaborate form.
How far does this reasoning convince you?
Not at all
Entirely
Deepenings
What physics leaves blank
- Open a physics textbook: you will find equations relating magnitudes to other magnitudes. Each is defined by its role in those equations, never by what it is independently of them.
- , like the astrophysicist Eddington, already drew the consequence: physics gives us the structure of the material world, not its stuff. It is like a perfect map of a territory one knows nothing about.
- That gap is not a flaw in physics, it is its strength: it measures behaviour, and needs nothing else. But it leaves the question open, and declining to answer is not having answered.
Therefore The place is therefore vacant, and the question of what occupies it is legitimate, whatever answer one gives.
How far does this reasoning convince you?
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Entirely
Radical emergence
- It is readily replied that consciousness from the brain as liquidity emerges from water molecules. But liquidity follows: knowing the shape of the molecules and their bonds, one understands why the whole flows.
- Nothing of the sort for experience: no complexity of structure, however dizzying, lets one derive that there is someone for whom it is like something. One may always add relations to relations, no point of view will come out of it.
- A strong emergence, which no knowledge of the parts could predict, is no longer an explanation: it is a miracle recorded under a learned name.
Therefore Experience must therefore already be there, in elementary form, in what we are made of.
How far does this reasoning convince you?
Not at all
Entirely
Put to the test
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