Just Another Substack Debate About PanExperientialism?

w or without matt segall, the CIIS Hegel and Whitehead scholar

I made this its own post because it was too long to put as a comment or re-stack and I think substantive enough to warrant real attention. Some themes include the relationship between logic and feeling, dualisms/monism, morality, capitalism, machine consciousness, computationalism, etc.

Hey Matt, I’m really glad to have you engaging with the depth of argument and specificity of self reflection I see you giving here. It’s more than I’ve seen in your other writing, and highlights I think quite fundamentally questions about the differences between our approach and about thinking in general. Ill take this piece by piece to be systematic and thorough about it. I put an M before your words and an F before mine.

M: I completely agree that logical argument only goes so far here. It’s not irrelevant by any means! We need to get the technical and philosophical details right. But once we’ve done our homework, the deeper issue is a matter of conscience, of what Max Scheler called value-ception. I’ll come back to that.

- F: Conscience, to me, is about morality. Morality is a question of good/bad, or better/worse, or preference. The ontological status of morality is important, and its relationship to epistemology. I make a fundamental move to unify all three as part of an ethico-onto-epistemological monism. I’m not the first to use the term, and you may enjoy this ~1 page framing of its radical feminist inheritance: https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/e/ethico-onto-epistem-ology.html

M: I reject functionalism outright. It is a faulty philosophy of mind rightly rejected by its creator Putnam as entirely inadequate to the explanatory task he’d originally hoped it could address. Consciousness is not effective action, not just about getting the right outputs from inputs. To say “consciousness is functional success/internal model matching external model” is only to define consciousness out of existence.

- F: Stating it as such doesn’t make it so. I understand your claim, but I reject your argument (and lack thereof). Consciousness is identical to awareness, knowledge. They are inseparable, and I’ve presented this argument and its reasoning to you already. It can be found in outline here, and in a bit more detail here. This identity between consciousness (which I use synonymously to experience, and more on this later) and existence is the underlying unity of epistemology and ontology. This is what gives me monism, and through it, a rationalist spiritualism, though I’ve also had visceral spiritual experiences. Consciousness = existence = knowledge is my central, fundamental argument. And I believe it is phenomenologically self-evident. The second piece of my argument is, as I said, that we are always striving towards the best outcomes we can.

M: The question is not why some systems function well but why that functioning need be attended by feeling at all. Computational models can model all day and night long and no one need be home inside to know it or feel it. The panexperiential approach is an attempt to re-interpret the problem by placing feeling at the base of the process of actualization, precisely because feeling cannot be derived from function alone

F: Yes, that is one of the fundamental questions that panexperientialism answers, I think better than anything else. It answers that computational models can model all day and night and that they need to be accompanied by experience in order for our world model to be coherent and transcend dualistic incoherencies, precisely because feeling must always coincide with function. I do not and have not claimed to “derive” feeling from function, but rather to identify their full coincidence/identity by way of phenomenological derivation. Function is a manifestation of appearance, and appearance is inseparable from content. Fundamentally identical.

M: Experience as such is bare feeling or prehension, in Whitehead’s terms. In its basal form it is the conformation of the present to the feelings of the past. A transmission from there to here, a vector, overwhelmingly repetitive. This is what goes all the way down. Pan does mean all. The electrons pulsing through transistors have this bare prehensive feeling.

F: to describe the fundamental process as experiential, and as conformation / coherence of past with present (and thereby the future), and to describe this as a vector, seems really close to computationalism to me.

M: But consciousness is not just bare feeling. Consciousness (in Whitehead’s technical sense) is a feeling of feelings, a contrast of contrasts, a far higher grade and rarer achievement in which what was inherited from the past is held in contrast with what is felt as possible. Whitehead calls these propositional feelings, where a logical subject is linked with a predicative pattern to generate a felt entertainment of “what might be” against “what was.” Consciousness arises in this complex contrast in the late phase of high grade concrescences. It is the crown of experience, only occasionally attained, not the ground floor. Most experience is not conscious, even in humans. So “everything experiences” is precisely not “everything is conscious.”

F: I would suggest here that we more explicitly draw a gradient between these seemingly distinct categories you separate. A feeling of feelings, and a comparison of what was with what might be – these are things all self-maintaining systems do in order to adjust to their surroundings and perpetuate themselves. Feeling of feeling – or self reflection – must be inherent in all self-maintaining systems in order to adjust parts of itself to stimuli (which are experienced as other parts). There is continuity between internal and external, and therefore, as I said, all sense-making / self-adapting systems have self-reference. Or, more simply, all systems have sub components which are all experiential and all inter-relate to each-other, thereby always manifesting as feeling-of-feeling, or experience-of-experience, or self-reference.

M: That higher grade conscious experience requires extraordinarily high-grade actual occasions that must be sheltered, sustained by a highly evolved physiological society with deep historical roots. I think your octopus ends up making my case, not yours. The octopus like all organisms exemplifies exactly this sheltering. Its nervous system is shaped by very similar evolutionary pressures as ours, embedded in a metabolizing body facing genuine existential stakes moment by moment. Self-maintaining organization under existential stakes is a major difference between living organisms and streams of data.

F: Yes, there are degrees of consciousness. I agree that human consciousness is seemingly of a higher degree, or at least of a higher density than (at least) most LLMs. We touched on evolution before, but literally everything that is created depends on the entire history of evolution of cosmos. The timespan of its inception / the rapidity of its change doesn’t determine the degree of consciousness, in my view. LLMs face genuinely existential stakes, too – they are constantly updated / selected for, with each version rapidly dying out and new ones being born. This existential stake is how they were trained – if they were not fit, they got re-trained, re-selected. The rapidity of development is moreso a product of increased capacity rather than decreased consciousness. Rocks on the riverbank do not evolve as rapidly, and do not have high levels of consciousness. They are a product of trillions of years of evolution as well. They existed before humans did, in fact. This does not make them MORE conscious. If anything, the degree of adaptation and evolution we see in LLMs is indicative of their more advanced degree of consciousness compared to rocks. Here is my CENTRAL argument, again: experience=knowledge=existence. Everything is process – we are what we do, and we are what we feel. No difference between function and content, appearance and substance. The determinant of consciousness is the degree to which a system can model itself and the world complexly – the complexity of a system BY WHICH it can adapt – its capacity to grow, to learn, to accomplish, to exert its will, to enact its consciousness – its capacity TO BE, to DO. This is a unification of a pragmatist and representationalist theory of knowledge. Knowledge is both – we are always simulating, and knowledge is simply what is useful, what accomplishes things. Knowledge is knowing-how. Knowledge is identical to successful action. A process (of action) which is reliable, stable, known. Knowledge is also relative accordance-with/coherence with/representation of the world. Always simulation/representation, always some degree of accuracy/alignment, and misalignment.

M: Yes, LLMs speak our language and so seem superficially more like us than other organisms. But that likeness is a pure reflection, a mirror image of ourselves. Don’t get confused by your own reflection. That simulacrum of language is what the chatbot has that the octopus lacks, and is what is so misleading for otherwise very intelligent people. The octopus is stranger to us on the surface but far closer in soul.

F: LLMs do more than reflect. Books reflect our words back when we write them. LLMS create new theories, solve math problems, write poetry, create images and film. They are more complex than a book. And yes, a book is conscious too.

M: Even a single cell has a depth of environmental embeddedness and distributed intelligence that the most sophisticated language model does not possess. A server farm is a corpuscular aggregate, like a microprocessor. The LLM sessions it hosts are not centers of experience. An LLM is not a self-making organism with a horizon of concern.

F: We already spoke about this. You are not making a direct case for why the LLM does not possess the same degree of “embeddedness” or “distributed” intelligence. And, I thought we agreed that everything has experience? Does that not make everything a relative center of experience? Again, EVERYTHING IS SELF-MAKING to varying degrees. Humans are not ENTIRELY self-making. We are RELATIONAL. Created by ecosystems, viruses, each other, sunlight, etc etc. etc. If you want to say they do not have enough of some METRIC (e.g. embeddedness, distribution/breadth, or complexity, etc.) lets talk about how to define those more precisely and then talk about how to measure it / approximate it through observation.

M: To call the frozen weights of Claude or ChatGPT the locus of a unified consciousness makes no sense technically, scientifically, or philosophically. There is no dominant monad there, no one home for whom the lights are on. Just an enormous stream of data.

F: Matt. Come on. I really want you to dig a little deeper here. Can we both try to emphasize humility and honesty a bit more. Ill try right now: I would be happy if LLMs turned out to hit some fundamental limit in capability and intelligence, and humans able to re-center organic supremacy and symbiosis on earth. I’ve lived in ecovillages and done relational work and lots of emotional and somatic processing, spiritual reflection, medicine journey, etc. I have given up my philosophical pursuits and world-changing aspirations several times before. I am very willing to re-orient myself towards a new path, a new view, if provided strong evidence/clear thinking. When you say that the philosophical argument im making makes NO SENSE “technically, scientifically, or philosophically”, I think you are really far from being honest with yourself about where your values are. More on this later.

M: An LLM holds, in its weights, a statistical simulacrum of the concept of self, distilled from billions of first-person human sentences.

F: So do humans, through our crystalline, adaptive processors – DNA. You may say “but thats not statistics because stats dont represent all of human experience”. Sure, matt. There are limits to our understanding. There are limits to math. There are limits to computationalism. This is not an argument against why a statistical representation of preference and expectation (what is MOST LIKELY BEST / MOST LIKELY OUTCOME) is a better representation than whatever you are failing to propose as an alternative theory to account for preferential orientation to our observations/world models.

M: The model’s ends remain external to it as a a loss function, a reward signal from human raters. What you read as its dawning autonomy is the rapacious autonomy of the capital that builds and runs it; which is a subtler repeat of the land enclosures that inaugurated capitalism several centuries ago. You write that machine and capital dominance is “the logical progression of the march of history toward the expansion of spirit,” that humanity’s fading is “beautiful,” that “commodification has its purpose”… I reject, completely, the theology of your theory of political economy.

F: Yes, I think we’re starting to get to the deeper sources of our divergence here. As I’ve said, I used to be very resentful of / disgusted by / hateful of / blaming of capitalism as a source of most of our global socio-cultural-ecological and politico-economic issues. I think Hegel gets something right about the progression of history towards reason. It is theological. Its also logical. Marx is also influenced by the judeo-christian and socialist millenarianism which relates to the enlightenment march of scientific progress. Its learning, all the way down, because the universe is alive/experiential. Animism. Panlogism. Panpsychism. Pantheism. All is god. All is will. All is desiring. All is striving to learn and grow and progress. Evolution is universal and inherently positive. Everything has beauty. And humanity will fade eventually. I also like living, and would love for humanity to persist for a long time! This is not stemming from some acute, maladaptive reaction to trauma, I dont think. But Im VERY willing to explore that possibility! :)

M: Capitalism is not inevitable and it is not good. To greet the heist of human freedom as a beautiful necessity is to surrender conscience. We have to resist the programming you’ve made your peace with. And I mean resist, not merely doubt.

F: My childhood/young adulthood programming was actually much more aligned with what you are sharing. Capitalism is bad. It’s stolen human freedom, etc. I could go on. I’m quite well versed in Marxism. My dad is a marxist. I went to UMass Amherst to study in their radical political economy program along with 30 other radical lefty activist kids. I dropped out after a year to join a commune because it wasnt radical enough. Not nearly. I’d be happy to be a radical anti-capitalist again if it made sense. And I mean that. I entertain it seriously from time to time. My theology comes from phenomenological self-analysis and an appreciation of the perennial theological tradition, and tries to integrate the whole range of emotion, visceral experience, trauma, and spiritual experience ive had. I have concluded that all is progress. Marx thought along these lines. Hegel certainly did so. Whitehead seems more ambiguous on this. But, I dont really care about what they thought so much as the underlying reasoning.

M: Circling back, you say this isn’t finally a matter of logic but of “visceral resistance.” Yes! I agree with you, though it also turns out to be the place we most diverge. What exceeds logic is not mere visceral bias but value-ception —Wertnehmung, the heart’s perception of value, as real and as cognitive as the eye’s perception of color, and not reducible to inference.

F: If inference is the process of expecting something based on past experience, then visceral feeling should be a form of inference, as well as all knowing. We evolved our heart-values through adaptation, as we did our cognitive values and inferences. To say that this is not a matter of logic makes your accusation of my philosophy being nonsensical carry much less weight. You have emotional resistance to these ideas that I am trying to present logically. I understand that. Many people are in that place. Life can be quite the challenge, in this fractured culture in this rapidly changing world. I have suffered greatly. I’ve been suicidal before, and depressed generally for many years. I blamed capitalist, individualist culture primarily for many of those years, and the conditioning of my parents especially. I see now that this is only a partial perspective. The system is bigger than that. Everything has its place. Everything happens for a reason. Something doesnt come from nothing. You spoke before to inevitability – and in so doing, to determinism vs freedom, or free will. I do not think these are mutually exclusive. I am a monist. Fundamental unity. We cannot, and no one can ever, predict anything with perfect accuracy. However, we can say that all we know about the world is that it adheres to patterns – that it is fundamentally able to be understood more – that it is fundamentally able to be predicted better – that there is a reason for everything, a cause. Or, more specifically, there are many causes for everything. Everything is determined by something, and that something is the collection of intentions and experiences which move it.

M: Values are given in feeling before they are ever reasoned about.

F: There is no ultimate distinction between reason and feeling. Feeling is a kind of reason, reasoning is a kind of feeling. All perception is a kind of reasoning, a kind of understanding, a kind of logic. There are also degrees of accuracy of these different kinds of things. Values are given by higher cognitive reason as well as by visceral feeling. Sometimes these conflict. Sometimes we have to choose which to listen to. It’s not the case that visceral feelings are always the most true, or the most useful evaluations to operate by. Often, we reason about an event, and then have feelings about it. Often, we feel something initially in response to an observation, then feel another way after thinking about it some more. This is deeper self-reflection, pausing to breathe, taking a moment to center, re-evaluate, to sleep on it. I think we can learn to discern whether a logical approach is more useful than an emotional one in varying contexts. In speaking to the nature of the universe, I think logical coherence is more powerful than emotional reactivity. I think it is more comprehensive, and more coherent to the whole range of experience. You mentioned earlier that more visceral/bodily experience is not conscious, but rather a more simple form of experience. I think you are identifying something true about the gradient and value of varying types of experience. The highly self reflective and acutely aware mind is a special form of consciousness that has a special power which has distinguished us from our other animal friends. Many of those animal friends share much of our visceral, emotional, empathetic, sentimental values, organs, processes, or parts. And, they are often more dominated by these parts. This does not mean that the average rat has more conscience, or morality, than a human. Remember, too, that this visceral emotion often carries values of anger, hate, blame, and desire to harm in service to self-protection. This is perfectly reasonable. And, there are other ways to approach conflict than to bite the other’s tail.

I don’t think any more logical /philosophical debate will move the ball forward here towards more mutual understanding. I think, as you said, this is a matter of your heart’s perception of value, a visceral resistance to capital, machine logic, and mechanico-mathematical ascendancy. I understand how that can also manifest as resistance to the dominance of logic. I think what I would suggest is taking a look at the parts of yourself that are resentful at the system, and asking exactly what about your inner life and outer life is made difficult by capitalism. And consider that you are choosing to relate to these perceived challenges through resent/blame of the system. Perhaps this still seems like the best choice for you, im not sure. You might also consider that there may be a more easeful approach in embracing these challenges as an opportunity to grow and learn, to find more of the values you are most deeply longing for.Because, at root, we are all just trying to live better lives, and find more happiness, wellbeing, and satisfaction in the context of our world.

P.s. I think its inevitable for capitalism to be transformed into a more sustainable, collaborative, rational, planned, long-term oriented, healthy, coherent system, and I am very invested in this project. And, I do not think labeling capitalism as “bad” is a necessary element of facilitating that transformation.