The Curious Incident of Indistinguishable Selves A Reply to Nešić

ABSTRACT

This is a short discussion of Janko Nešić’s [2022. “Towards a Neutral-Structuralist Theory of Consciousness and Selfhood.” International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 1–17], which conveys a critical review of Beni’s Structural Realist theory of the Self (SRS). Nešić’s critique indicates that there is an incongruity between the structuralist tendency of SRS and its commitment to panpsychism. He argues that Beni can use the notion of internal information to develop a more congenial account of consciousness than panpsychism. In this paper, I defend the panpsychist component of Beni’s theory and explain why I think it’s preferable to Nešić’s proposal.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 It may be also argued that the notion of causal powers in the context of IIT is not well-articulated enough to underlie a plausible account of consciousness (Beni 2018a; Searle 2013).

2 Nešić is right to assume that the issue of intrinsicality is missed in the statement of SRS. The issue of intrinsicality has been also glossed over in Beni’s other engagement with pansychism as well. In another paper, Beni (2021) allegedly uses FEP to reconstruct the argument from intrinsic nature for panpsychism. This argument holds that we have access to the intrinsic nature of only parts of reality, i.e., our brains, which are consciousness-involving. Since science is silent about the intrinsic nature of physical entities, there is no inconsistency in assuming that physical entities too are consciousness-involving. However, Beni’s reconstruction of the argument from intrinsic nature has mainly a negative impact. It only aims to show that we cannot set a distinction between ourselves and other self-organising systems only from our own internal perspective. That is to say, assuming that the cognitive processes of human being and the process of natural selection could both be modelled in the same formal terms by FEP, we cannot discount the possibility of the conscious nature of natural selection simply by assuming that only our cognitive processes have intrinsic nature.

3 Perhaps it is also worth mentioning that not only the proposal is incompatible with the naturalist impact of Beni’s work, it can hardly be reconciled with recent FEP-based accounts of consciousness that lean towards an illusionist stance, which denies that phenomenal experiences are what they appear to be. For example, take Clark, Friston, and Wilkinson’s (2019) account, which specifies phenomenal experiences in terms of inferred causes of sensory experiences that are constructed to best explain the raw sensory flux aspires. This account goes beyond the hard problem of consciousness and the Cartesian puzzlement. Inspired by Dennett’s (1983) earlier work, Clark et al.’ deny that qualia are indeed raw phenomenal experiences and argue that our brains construct qualia as inferred causes in our best internal cognitive models of embodied interactions with the world. This point is important, because as Nešić remarks, Beni’s articulation of SRS depends on FEP, and at least some FEP theorists are averse to start from the hard problem or embracing the veracity of essentially intrinsic experiences.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Turkey- Bilim Akademisi 2022 BAGEP Young Scientist Award.