Is Science Undergoing a Metaphysical Shift?

A dispute erupted in the field of consciousness studies. Why this is good news.

A group of 124 scientists signed a letter complaining that the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of consciousness is pseudoscience, unleashing a fierce fight among scientists and philosophers. You can find some accounts here, here, and here.

Let me tell you what this is all about, and why I believe that this is a (very positive) symptom of desperation of the dying materialistic paradigm. It is the intellectual empire of naturalism that is slowly (even though still subconsciously) realizing that the ship is sinking.

But let me proceed step by step.

First of all, what is IIT?

Phi, the symbol used for integrated information.

Well, to be honest, I never felt like it was worth my time and energy. I tried sometimes to go through it but, since it is one of those things that are unnecessarily contrived and obscure—contrary to consciousness which is the only self-evident and self-explanatory thing that exists—it never made much sense to me, I was soon distracted by something more interesting. Anyway, you might be interested in digging deeper into it by yourself here, here, or, in its latest version, here.

According to the abstract of the latter source:

IIT “identifies the essential properties of experience (axioms), infers the necessary and sufficient properties that its substrate must satisfy (postulates), and expresses them in mathematical terms. In principle, the postulates can be applied to any system of units in a state to determine whether it is conscious, to what degree, and in what way.“- “IIT aims to account for consciousness and its properties in physical terms. The theory identifies the essential properties of experience (axioms [the essential aspects of every conscious experience]), formulates them as physical properties in terms of cause–effect power (postulates [the properties required of a conscious physical substrate]), and provides a mathematical formalism for assessing those properties. This formalism can be employed to “unfold” a cause–effect structure [a physical system is conscious by virtue of its causal properties and that must be unified, i.e. ‘integrated’, ] from a substrate constituted of units in a state, whose interactions can be characterized as interventional conditional probabilities. According to IIT, all the properties of an experience can be accounted for, in physical terms, by those of a cause–effect structure that satisfies its postulates.“

It doesn’t sound to be easy stuff. Right? To put it bluntly, it is a theory that, by a complicated mathematical model, relates the physical properties of a structure to some aspects of experience we know from first-person knowledge. IIT makes statements on how to measure consciousness, how it correlates with brain states, and, as its creator Giulio Tononi says, how “the loss and recovery of consciousness should be associated with the breakdown and recovery of information integration.”

This is in line with the fact that the brain is an interconnected network in which no specific region carries out one function. Modern neuroscience thinks more in terms of network science, where several brain regions are highly interconnected and interdependent. This interconnectivity between parts of the brain enables the type of complex functions of which the brain is capable, and by the integration of its information, to the emergence of a conscious awareness.

But you know what? It is irrelevant to know the details of the theory to understand what is really going on here. Because what is at stake here isn’t so much about a scientific debate. Follow me…

Integrate, interconnect, combine, and unify. Does consciousness emerge?

The point is that IIT received a great deal of attention in recent years, was hailed as the leading theory of consciousness worldwide, and, thanks to media hype, it could profit from a huge PR stunt. Recently, certain coverage seemed to incorrectly suggest that it has been successfully verified with some experimental tests. No such thing was the case, but this is what came through to a broader public, and evidently set up many other scientists who proposed different theories of consciousness and that were eclipsed by all this gossip surrounding IIT.

And what do you do when the theory of your academic opponent gets a disproportionate attention that your own theory could only dream of? You can play the dirty “pseudoscience” card!

Before commenting further, let me cite some interesting comments one could find online, and that nicely illustrate the mood and state of affairs.

Joseph E. LeDoux, Neuroscientist at NYU

“IIT as Pseudoscience: The media have recently celebrated the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) as a ‘leading’ and empirically tested theory of consciousness. We are writing as researchers with some relevant expertise to express our concerns.”

David Chalmers, a philosopher at New York University (the guy who became famous for the so-called hard problem of consciousness)

“IIT has many problems, but "pseudoscience" is like dropping a nuclear bomb over a regional dispute. it's disproportionate, unsupported by good reasoning, and does vast collateral damage to the field far beyond IIT. as in vietnam: "we had to destroy the field in order to save it."

To which Patricia Churchland, an analytic philosopher at the University of California, and well known for her popular books on neurophilosophy, promptly replied: “The nuclear bomb analogy seems a bit like overkill.”

Philip Goff, professor at Durham University, well known for his support of panpsychism, doubled down: “Civil war has broken out in the field of consciousness research.”

Anil Seth, Neuroscientist and professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, is also well-known to the public for his theory of the brain as a ‘prediction machine’:

“IIT can and should be critiqued, but this letter, despite many admirable signatories (& colleagues/friends) is disappointing. The accusation of pseudoscience is serious and IMO the letter doesn't justify it…”

Stanislas Dehaene professor at the Collège de France of cognitive neuroscience.

“While not a big fan of the recent "pseudoscience" name-calling, I have to confess that, like my 124 colleagues, I am quite disappointed by IIT's inability to make anything but banal predictions concerning the recent ARC-Cogitate adversarial collaboration.” – “… IIT "triumphs" with trivial predictions that could have been made by neurophysiologists 40 years ago (see the short paragraphs that I contributed to the preprint). Furthermore, none of these predictions are mathematically derived.”

Stuart Hameroff anesthesiologist and professor at the University of Arizona known for his controversial theory that consciousness originates from quantum states in neural microtubules. 

“While David Chalmers and Christof Koch have been pushing IIT, they’ve also been snuffing Orch OR which has explanatory power, biology and experimental support. Is it pseudoscience?”

Someone even set up a fake Twitter account of the UCLA Department of Psychology to anonymously let free his/her emotional outbursts.
“We stand in solidarity with the signatories of the IIT preprint. There is no room in our esteemed field for pseudoscience. The success of the signatories speaks for itself. We mustn’t let this dilettante panpsychism mislead still naive trainees and fuel the far right.”

What on earth panpsychism (the theory that posits that ‘all is consciousness’, also particles, and rocks, etc.) has to do with the political far right, remains utterly mysterious. But how a scientific discussion has become a defamatory practice field by online trolls speaks volumes.

Erik Hoel,  a research assistant professor at Tufts University:

“I am not a fan of this letter. Everyone who signed it acted irresponsibly. Why? There’s an issue beyond its specific content. I’ve been saying for years that as a fledging science consciousness research should worry about hanging out too much dirty laundry. If too much is hung out, then petty infighting can destroy an already fragile field. My greatest fear is that we get another “consciousness winter” wherein just talking about consciousness is considered pseudoscientific bunk. This was the state of affairs throughout most of the 20th century, and it set neuroscience back decades.”

Last but not least, in my view, the best comment that goes right to the point came from Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes, Philosopher of Mind and Metaphysics and lecturer at The University of Exeter.

“These charges of the heresy of IIT are really not about empirical science and pseudoscience but about metaphysical shifts underlying science, and the ethical and political changes that supervene. We hear here a last, awkward gasp of the dated ideology of the twentieth century.”

So, in what sense is this an interesting debate, not so much for its content, but for what it really reveals?

The first question that came to my mind when seeing this letter, was: “Would I have signed it?”

Since I’m one who posits that consciousness is fundamental, not a fortuitous by-product of a wet 1.3 kg piece of meat in our skull, and am a staunch critic of the obscure and contrived theories of consciousness that posit consciousness as a point of arrival, not as a starting point, my first instinct was to answer positively.

However, reading the latter, its tone, and especially the people signing it, I came to the opposite conclusion.

First of all a semantic clarification is needed, because not only does the significance of words vary depending on the perspective and interpretation of those who use them, but if not used properly, words can cause harm and unjustly eventually ruin other’s reputations and careers.

Be aware that the concept of “pseudoscience” is quite a fuzzy one. Nobody seems to remember that during the entire 20th century, tons of philosophers of science tried to clearly define the demarcation line between what is supposed to be ‘scientific’ vs. something ‘pseudoscientific.’ It is the famous “demarcation problem” of the philosophy of science. While most agree that this distinction exists, nobody knows where to draw the red line. Therefore, when you point at your colleagues for entertaining a pseudoscientific theory, you are coming up with a characterization that could be considered pseudoscientific itself. For example, IIT is a mathematical theory. Does mathematics make it automatically scientific? Many would agree, but many others do not. It can be a matter of opinion.

What about the theories that describe a reality we will probably never be able to observe and, thereby, are considered by some being pseudoscience? Such as theories about the existence of multiverses, the many world interpretation of quantum mechanics that believes the universe branches into another universe every time one makes a measurement, or the existence of strings trillion times smaller than an electron? Yet, there are many physicists working on multiverse or many worlds theories, let alone on string theory.

So, the term pseudoscience is in the eye of the beholder.

But precisely for this reason, ‘pseudoscience’ is all too often used as a derogatory term that you can throw at every theory that you don’t like. Especially if you are a high-ranking authority in the field (as some of the names who signed the letter are) then you can use the ‘pseudoscience’ wand as a devastating weapon. You can ruin the reputation, and eventually the career of others who are not so renewed, such as young graduates who work on that theory (at this point, I would not like to be in the shoes of a Ph.D. student defending a doctoral dissertation on IIT in front of a committee that believes it to be pseudoscience.) In other words, using the pseudoscience epithet can become an abuse of power from authority. I agree with Hoel that this attitude can set back the progress of science.

It already did. It has been regularly and ruthlessly used for decades to shut down the research that could investigate so-called ‘paranormal’ or ‘PSI-phenomena. With few exceptions, most departments avoid like hell being involved in such kind of research, because they know that they would be immediately stigmatized as pseudoscientific, causing an uproar of condemnation and disapproval, that would only harm their prestige. We could say that the modern pseudoscience accusation has some analogies with the medieval heresy charge of the Inquisition. People are not burnt at the stake but one can be fired, lose their job, and reputation, or see research funds cut or denied. While, if you want to criticize a theory, you write a scientific article to be subjected to a peer-review journal. That’s how a scientific debate should be made, not via politically motivated letters and petitions.

These are the reasons why I would not sign a letter that brands a rival theory as pseudoscience. By the way, another apparently innocent but ultimately derogatory designation that I avoid using (very common among militant atheists skeptics) is the “free thinker” label. Read: “If you don’t agree with me, that’s because you are not able to think freely.” It is a sort of academic intolerance and fundamentalism that is steadily growing in the modern scientific community.

Another point worth mentioning is that several names that signed the letter (e.g., Patricia Churchland, Daniel Dennett, Keith Frankish, Bernard Baars) are themselves proponents of theories that could easily be criticized for similar reasons, and branded as pseudoscience as well. These people came up with complicated, and, in my opinion, no less ‘pseudoscientific’ (whatever that might mean) theories than IIT (here is a short overview of the four main contenders.) I would even say that, if we would like to establish a ‘pseudoscience hit parade,’ IIT would be, by far, the less pseudoscientific of all. And I personally regard Christof Koch, one of its most eminent proponents, as an ‘open-minded physicalist’ who gives you food for thought.

Having said that, this does not imply that IIT is a serious theory having any chance to withstand the test of history. In my view, it is only one out of the many theories that are desperately trying to cling to forms of ‘abstractism.’ I believe this is the wrong direction.

Here is a collection I made over the years of processes in the brain or cells that people imagine having the magic power to resurrect consciousness out of nothing:

‘Representations,’ ‘meta representations,’ ‘higher/lower order mental states,’ ‘self-representation,’ ‘attentional amplification,’ ‘recurrent and reentrant processes,’ ‘neural Darwinism,’ ‘multi-level predictive inferences,’ ‘self-generated actions,’ ‘homeostatic routines generating affects,’ ‘homeorethic equipoise,’ ‘multilevel reciprocal communication,’ ‘informational interactome,’ ‘neurally encoded models of selective attention,’ ‘encoded body maps,’ ‘signaling integration,’ ‘electromagnetic fields encoding,’ ‘quantum collapse in microtubules,’ ‘global workspaces,’ ‘non-linear self-organizing complexity,’ ‘unpredictable autonomous self-regulating autopoietic systems,’ ‘informational autocatalytic hypercycles,’ ‘self-referential feedback loops,’ ‘re-entrant or feed-forward architecture’[IIT], ‘resonances in dynamical systems,’ ‘radical emergence,’ ‘far from equilibrium non-linear thermodynamics,’ ‘phase transitions,’ ‘entropy theories,’ ‘free energy principles,’ ‘garnering information game that maximizes the evidence for my own existence,’ ‘adjacent possibles,’ ‘Markov blancket,’ ‘bayesian evidence maximization,’ ‘enactive,’ ‘extended-, embodied-, or distributed cognition,’ ‘interoceptive and exteroceptive body representations,’ ‘cellular automata,’ ‘Turing non-computable,’ ‘Gödel incomplete,’ ‘undecidable,’ ‘irreducible,’ ‘impredicative,’ ‘unformalizable,’ ‘non-algorithmic,’ ‘non-prestatable,’ ‘an adaptive and emergent evolutionary dialectic,’ ‘a metabolic and ecological co-constructive dynamics,’ ‘hierarchical and self-referential far-from-equilibrium thermodynamic autopoiesis, anticipation, and adaptation.’
‘I am a strange loop.’ :(

…and who knows what….

Why should these processes, with the plethora of abstract concepts attached to them, give rise to something that resembles nothing of a physical process or a concept? This increasing number and complexity of theories that don’t lead to any tangible result, is reminiscent of the old Ptolemies who were not willing to give up the geocentric worldview—and by placing the earth at the center of the universe, not the Sun—desperately tried to ‘save the appearances’ at any cost by adding complicated epicycles on top of other epicycles to fit the observed planetary orbits. With consciousness, we see the same attitude: matter must be at the center of the universe, not consciousness. Whatever it costs.

There is, however, only a slight complication: This time, what needs to be explained with empirical observations is nothing that can be observed to begin with, it is that which observes. If one is stuck in abstractions, this can only lead to an intellectual short circuit that bounces back and forth between an instinct of going inward and that is, short after, called back by an exteriorizing mentalization (that’s where all those ‘self-’ or ‘auto-’ or ‘re-entrant’ suffixes come from.) The unwillingness to even consider a paradigm shift a possibility—namely that consciousness might be the fundamental primitive, and not matter—forces us to conceive of theories with ever-increasing sophistication that fail to meet expectations.

Deep down the reason why in consciousness studies people spend so much time on these theories is because they don't know themselves. If they would allow themselves to go inside, to take the first-person perspective, calm their mind, and question their materialistic assumptions, they would easily see that resorting to these contrived speculations isn’t much more than obscure sophistry.

Nevertheless, notice that this time, the people involved in this call against pseudoscience are not pointing their fingers against some research on PSI phenomena, but are materialists fighting materialists. Their theories all have a common denominator, a physicalist or functional theoretical framework. This aspect I found the most interesting.

To a post-materialist like me, who sees their ideas at odds with all that I believe, this internal conflict within the same community appears clearly as a symptom. It is an act of desperation and helplessness. They see how, no matter how hard they try, their efforts to make consciousness pop into existence, is an attitude leading nowhere. Others take refuge in a state of denial claiming that consciousness is an ‘illusion’—the so-called ‘illusionists’ or ‘eliminativists’. But the refusal to change, or the state of denial, is always a symptom, an external indicator of a stagnating and collapsing paradigm (I would even go so far as to say that physicalism has some interesting sociological aspects analogous to those of climate change denial…. but I won’t digress here) It is a sign that they are feeling the “metaphysical shift,” the “last, awkward gasp of the dated ideology of the twentieth century,” as Sjöstedt-Hughes pointed out. A shift from a reductionist, deterministic, and mechanistic worldview that would like us to be nothing else than biological robots with no meaning and purpose, made of chunks of unconscious, meaningless, and purposeless matter, to a vision that, maybe, perhaps, possibly, we are not. It is the (more or less subconscious) understanding that the pressure on them is mounting and that circumstances are making it increasingly evident how ineffective and empty their naturalism is. I believe this is also one of the reasons for a general crisis in science. We are in the midst of a replicability crisis, with lots of bad science and retracted papers, the rise of a post-truth age, and the lack of progress in several fields (e.g., see my post here.)

But when you are not willing to admit your mistake (and don’t want to lose the prestige that conferred you respect and career), the prime instinct is to blame others for your own weaknesses. You must find the scapegoat. And this is easily done by using the magical wand of ‘pseudoscience.’ I know this from my own experience. Often facts did not square with my worldview and I blamed others for doing and being what in my worldview was considered inadmissible. But sooner or later we must grow up and question our assumptions.

Anyway, history will tell. But I must make a confession: I enjoyed leaning back and getting my popcorn, feeling a sense of (a bit perverse) satisfaction in seeing them throwing tantrums against each other. Because all this has nothing to do with science, or pseudoscience, or philosophy. It is a purely sociological phenomenon indicative of the coming end of a century-old paradigm, the collapse of materialism. Something that must be welcomed with open arms.