More photos will be on Facebook

I was on the computer a few days ago when this song came up randomly on the music channel I was listening to:



A tremendous wave of melancholia washed over me, and I had to stop whatever I was doing then. I like this particular rendition of the song. It's slower, and the lower notes can be heard more clearly. I find that the lower notes are the ones causing the most poignancy.

I came back from Brisbane 2 weeks ago, where I was at for a philosophy conference. I didn't find the talks I attended too remarkable. They were either straightforwardly poor, or didn't say anything too striking. I was hoping, too, for more rigorous, pointed debates, but people seemed more interested in making tangential points or questions of curiosity. To be sure, I don't think I presented anything too striking either. My excuse is that I was there merely to see what others are up to. The paper I presented wasn't - or isn't - going to be one of my upcoming important work, and I didn't put in too much effort into the presentation, style-wise and content-wise. A few people did find my paper interesting though, at least interesting enough to come up to me after the talk to tell me they found it interesting, which raised doubts over whether they understood my talk at all. A more charitable interpretation, I guess, is that people do indeed have varied tastes - to each his own.

I skipped the last 2 days of the conference. I skipped it on Thursday because I finished my presentation at 10am, and after consuming a free tea buffet, went to tour the city area of the city with my fellow Masters student from NUS to relax. Public speaking takes its toll on me. He's an interesting fellow, my peer and room-mate. Polite, intelligent, with a sense of humour, though I think I'm funnier. We spent a fair number of hours playing Netrunner, a card game, and sparring intellectually in other arenas.

The presentations on Friday were, in the words of a professor I know, "not just uninteresting, but weird". The quality of the talks on the previous days - including the keynote addresses - quelled any optimism I would have had anyway, and I promptly spent half the day out in the sea whale-watching. Caught sight of a number of whales, but those moments were all too brief and not too near. The whales weren't being playful that day, as the boat captain remarked they were on some days. I'm usually skeptical of such claims - she could just be reinforcing our decision to pay for the trip - but photo and video evidence in general suggests they wouldn't be too far from the truth of such matters.

Experience

In reading up for my research work, I encountered a nice article by Galen Strawnson, titled The Minimal Subject. I liked a number of things he said in the article, but the one I want to mention here is a point he suggests in favour of panpsychism. I don't know much about panpsychism, much less the concrete arguments for it, but I think the general gist of it is that mental properties can be found in our most fundamental physical entities. Consider the most fundamental physical entity. It could be quarks, it could be something even smaller. The specifics don't matter. Panpsychists believe that experience, or the subjectivity of being, can be found in these entities.

What do I mean by experience? Well consider the experience you're having now. You're looking at screen, at some words. Maybe the fan is blowing at you. Maybe the air-con's turned on. In any case, there's a certain feel, a certain subjectivity, to this experience. There's a something it is like, to have that experience. There's a something it is like, to be you at this moment. Panpsychists believe that essentially similar feels obtain for any physical object, be it a stone, a table, or a turtle. That's simply the consequence of the belief that experience can be found in our most fundamental physical entities. Now, when I say that these things have experiences, I don't mean they have the kind of full-fledged consciousness that many human beings have. Experience, or the subjectivity of being, comes in degrees. It could be a very dim sort of feel for, say, an octopus; and it could be something quite beyond our imaginaton for a stone. But the point still is that experience can be found in any physical object.

Now, lest you think panpsychism is just a fanciful, imaginative doctrine, let me say that it coheres pretty well with our current scientific attitude. Consider the following:

1) Everything that is real is physical is nature.
2) Experiences are real.
Thus 3), Experiences are physical in nature.

Our current scientific attitude endorses 1). We posit no extravagant, non-physical entities, especially when we have no good justification to do so. 2) simply comes from taking experiences seriously. Some hardcore neuroscientists, philosophers, and physicalists think that experiences have only a functional meaning. So, for example, to have an experience of pain just is to be disposed to act in certain ways - and nothing else. I'm really not sure what philosophical argument can be used to convince these people otherwise, except to simply point out that while it's true pain can have a functional definition, surely there's more to pain than just that functional definition.

We note that 3) still isn't enough to give rise to full-fledged panpsychism. So we have

4) If experiences are physical in nature, then semblances of it (call them simplistic experiences, if you will) can be found in our most fundamental physical entities.
Thus 5), Semblances of experience can be found in our most fundamental physical entities.

From 5) it is only a short leap to think that more complex experiences can be found in more complex physical entities, like a stone. Why believe in 4)? I don't know. I guess it is a consequence of the view that experience doesn't just emerge, just like the weight of 50kg of stones doesn't just emerge. You can find smaller weights in smaller portions of the stones. Similarly, then, you can find simpler experiences in simpler physical entities.

Anyway, I've digressed. Strawson didn't go into all this in his article. The point he mentioned - a point that set me thinking - was simply that non-experiential being 'has in fact, now and forever, zero evidence to support it'. We are used to seeing non-living objects around us. We think they are just there. Without any experience. But, as Strawson suggests, we only have evidence of (our) subjective experiences. That's all we have evidence for existence. Can there really be non-experiential being?

You might think here that Strawson is pulling a fast one here. You might think that the burden of proof lies in those who think that being - especially non-living being - necessarily involves experience.  I'm not sure here. For we can ask, why isn't the burden of proof, not on those who positively say that inanimate objects like stones and tables don't have experiences? After all, what exactly is non-experiential being?

As I drifted off to sleep last night, I wondered what it is like to be a stone. Just lying there. No consciousness is involved, but that doesn't mean no experience is inolved, because there can be non-conscious experiences. (In fact, we probably experience that most of our lives, because we don't always introspect our mental states). It's hard to consciously think of a non-conscious experience. I imagined the subjectivity of a stone to be a patchwork of thick orange and red lines. Just lying there.

What is it like to be me, when I'm not wondering what it is like to be a stone? Sometimes you would feel something biting into me. Hard. Like I did something wrong. Like I'm doing something wrong. They are like tenterhooks, these voices. I can't hear them, but I can feel them. I am a patchwork too. A lazy one; a vivid one. There are easy times, and there are hard times. I don't differentiate the two. I can't. I go for jogs too, but sometimes I just lie on my bed, breathing.