Genesis by Experience, Part 3

In Genesis by Experience, Part 2, I continued sketching out my "genesis by experience" take on metaphysics. It is a theory of the existence of the human self or soul, a theistic theory that holds our — and the world's — existence to be caused, created, and constituted by "experience" taking place in the mind of God. Having such an experiential awareness of each and every one of us is what it means to say that God "sees" us: as the hymn goes, his eye is on the sparrow, and I know he watches me. It is by virtue of his never ceasing to watch us that each of us has an immortal soul.

Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop

My starting point in developing my "genesis by experience" philosophy of the soul is, as I said in the earlier post, Douglas Hofstadter's new book, I Am a Strange Loop. The book gives a explanation of how the human brain generates a sense of self or "I."

Hofstadter posits that the mind is populated with high-level "symbols" that emerge from the lower-level workings of the physical brain constituents, taken at the level of neurons, or atoms, or signals, or whatever. The self or "I" is simply the most crucial and most central of these emergent symbols, and Hofstadter accordingly identifies the emergent "I" with the consciousness we each harbor as well as with the soul we typically expect we have. (I personally think he is wrong about the soul having no independent existence outside the workings of the brain, and maybe about consciousness, too, but he's probably right about the emergence of the "I" symbol in the brain.)

David J. Chalmers's The Conscious Mind

My theory of genesis by experience depends, as I also said in that earlier post, on the notion that consciousness is causative. To borrow words from David J. Chalmers, author of The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, it is conceivable that consciousness itself — "subjective experience," "raw sensation" — is "a kind of causal nexus."

Our knowing "what is is like to be red," arising in response to the raw sensation we have of the color red when we see, say, a red tricycle, is what Chalmers means by consciousness. I consider it a kind of empathy. But it is more than that, I would quickly add. Consciousness is not only empathetic, it is also causative. I would, in fact, adopt the following as my philosophy's basic principle: causation is consciousness conferring coherence.

Chalmers finds consciousness and causality to be the two principal categories of facts in our world that do not supervene logically on physical facts. His book is primarily an argument that facts about consciousness do supervene on the facts and natural laws of our physical world ... but, for all logic has to say about it, the situation could be otherwise, and so the supervenience is "natural" and not "logical."

The natural/logical distinction can be put this way: unlike the logically necessary supervenience of biological facts on physical ones, the supervenience of consciousness on the physical realm in our world requires that God (figuratively speaking, in Chalmers' non-theistic worldview) had to do "extra work" or make "extra laws of nature" to make that happen.


Philosophers speak of "supervenience" when they want to to posit that one set of facts — or, actually, one set of properties — is unfailingly associated with another set that exists at a different conceptual level of organization. For example, living organisms' biological properties — for instance, their homeostasis, which is an organism's ability to regulate its internal environment to maintain a stable, constant condition — can be said to supervene on their physical properties such as the nature of the chemical reactions taking place inside their cells.

In I Am a Strange Loop, Hofstadter in effect shows how the mental constructs he calls "symbols" supervene on the electrochemical activity of neurons. When we want to talk about how the brain operates, we frequently need to take recourse to explanations involving the interactions of high-level symbols, he says, since trying to follow how low-level signals shunt about among the millions of neurons in the brain is a fool's errand. To reductively explain how, say, our seeing a cow triggers within us a feeling of nostalgia for a rustic past, we simply are forced to use the convenient "shorthand" of high-level symbols.


But Chalmers has it that not all supervenience is just a verbal shorthand that sidesteps the need to make impossibly detailed reductive explanations. In the case of consciousness, no reductive explanation is possible, Chalmers maintains. Hence, he says, consciousness is naturally supervenient on the physical, but it is not logically supervenient. In another imaginable world that is outwardly identical to this one, our "zombie twins" might wholly lack conscious experience.

Likewise, Chalmers shows that facts about causality in our world (as, for instance, how it is that we can know that "A causes B") supervene on "physical entities in space-time" in a mysterious way that we cannot logically say has to be that way.

David Hume and other philosophers, writes Chalmers (pp. 74-75), have claimed that

...external evidence only gives us access to regularities of succession between events; it does not give us access to any further fact of causation. So if causation is construed as something over and above the presence of a regularity (as I will assume it must be), it is not clear that we can know that it exists.

Put briefly, Chalmers simply assumes that causation beyond Hume's mere "regularities of succession" does in fact exist in our world, even if it's existence is mysterious and hard to confirm.

This problem concerning the uncertain existence of causality, says Chalmers, crops up also with respect to questions about consciousness. I can never know for sure that consciousness exists within you ... or, for that matter, within myself, since a zombie world is conceivable wherein my otherwise identical twin lacks consciousness, but is entirely unaware of that fact ... so how can I know for sure that I am who I claim I am, and not my blissfully ignorant zombie twin?

Concerning causality's hard-to-pin-down existence, Chalmers continues:

Once again, this skeptical problem goes hand in hand with a failure of logical [as opposed to natural] supervenience. In this case, facts about causation fail to supervene logically on matters of particular physical fact. Given all the facts about distribution of physical entities in space-time, it is logically possible that all the regularities therein arose as a giant cosmic coincidence without any real causation. At a smaller scale, given the particular facts about any apparent instance of causation, it is logically possible that it is a mere succession. We infer the existence of causation by a kind of inference to the best explanation — to believe otherwise would be to believe in vast, inexplicable coincidences — but belief in causation is not forced on us in the direct way that belief in biology is forced on us.

Chalmers accordingly believes that consciousness and causality are two separate categories of facts (and possibly the only two categories) that, out of other than strict logical necessity, spring forth from "the facts about distribution of physical entities in space-time" in our world.

True, he at one point (pp. 152-153) briefly considers, and then provisionally rejects, the possibility that these two sets of facts are ineffably related "so that there is a subtle sort of relevance for experience in causation." He says the main reason he spurns uniting the explanandum of causality with that of consciousness in such a way that one explanans serves to explain both is that "it seems to lead to a version of panpsychism, the view that everything is conscious, which many find counterintuitive."

My theory of genesis by experience, which builds a watchful divine consciousness into the description of our human situation, avoids panpsychism. It holds that Chalmers errs in assuming the existence of an independently determinable base of facts about the "distribution of physical entities in space-time" in our universe. It takes the fact that quantum phenomena such as which of two equiprobable paths a photon takes are fixed only by post-facto observation (see the earlier posts in this series and also Genesis by Observership) to imply that the distribution of physical entities in our world is not a given, knowable set of brute facts.

My idea of causation as "consciousness conferring coherence" sidesteps the problem of having to presume a set of independent physical facts by positing that a conscious divine being confers coherence on his created universe, and in so doing fixes certain physical facts that otherwise would not be fixed.

The coherence conferred by God's watchfulness — by his experience of the world he thus creates — is the same sort of coherence we confer when, by an act of observation, we eliminate the incoherence that would occur if we thought that a photon had arrived at our retina by Path B, even though we had been zeroed in on watching Path A at the time. Our act of observation likewise scotches the incoherence that would occur if we said that the unitary photon traveled along both paths at once.

In other words, when we zero in on Path A — say, by training a telescope on it, to the exclusion of Path B — our conscious act of observation "causes" Path A to have been the one actually used by the photon! Never mind that it seems wholly counterintuitive to think that our fixing of the photon's path happens after the fact, given that it was millions of years ago, long before humans even existed, that the photon set out upon its journey to our spot in the universe from a distant quasar. The scientists investigating the laws of quantum mechanics have shown that, as so often happens in science nowadays, our intuitions about this are simply wrong.

In fact, this would seem to be a case where counterintuitiveness and outright incoherence are at odds with one another ... and outright incoherence loses, to the detriment of intuitiveness. What the quantum physicist John Archibald Wheeler calls "genesis by observation" has to happen, no matter how counterintuitive it may seem to us, in order that the world we experience turns out to be a coherent one.