Many people will find the central proposal of the book What Matter Feels outlandish or inconceivable — or even just silly. But that doesn’t matter.
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Let’s put our understandable prejudices aside for a moment and imagine that all matter can experience feelings of pleasure or pain from its own point of view. Yes, even stones can feel good or bad!
Put it another way: consider that besides physical properties such as mass and energy, matter can also have certain psychological properties such as will and volition.
The reactions I get to this suggestion range from blank incomprehension to contemptuous denial. No proposal I have made in my academic career has caused so many people to stop talking to me so quickly.
Yet given the chance, I can explain that this is not a claim about the nature of matter or even about consciousness; it is not a metaphysical or ontological claim. It is more interesting than that.
A Scientific Proposal
In the book What Matter Feels, I set out a rigorous framework for studying the relationship between mind and matter. It is based on the proposal that for scientific purposes — and for scientific purposes only — we treat all matter as having a capacity to experience feelings like pleasure and pain from its own point of view.
Importantly, this is different from saying that all matter can consciously experience these feelings. Consciousness, I argue in the book, is a special form of experience that we find in certain biological systems when they are organised in specific ways. Experience, as I also explain, can be considered a general and rather mundane psychological property of matter that is produced whenever energy is exchanged.
A Scientific Method
What Matter Feels outlines a method for conducting experiments on the psychological states of systems using measurements of their physical states.
As illustrated in the image above, I propose that when we scientifically study a physical system, such as a flask of chemicals, we can think of it as having both material aspects, which can be seen from the observer’s point of view, and mental or experiential aspects, which exist from the system’s point of view, but remain unseen to the observer.
I stress that this is a proposed scientific method for studying the behaviour of material systems, not a philosophical claim about what matter might actually feel or not feel. It is simply a reasoned conjecture that can be experimentally tested in any system — living or non-living.
(Incidentally, I am not the first to make this conjecture; it was commonly advanced by many leading scientists in the nineteenth century. For a discussion, see David Skrbina’s great book on panpsychism.)
It is an interesting conjecture, however, because it can generate novel predictions about what we might observe experimentally. And most interestingly of all, it has explanatory potential. It predicts, for example, exactly what a flask of chemicals or a stone or a neurone or an ensemble of neurones will experience under certain conditions and explains why.
In fact, in the book I show that the proposal could have enormous explanatory power in many areas of science. It could explain — or at least help to explain — things as diverse as why we feel pleasure and pain, why apples fall to the earth and why complex systems emerge from simpler ones.
A Scientific Theory
Having offered this scientific proposal, I invite researchers from various fields of science to use the method to test it experimentally. Only then can we find out if it has any scientific value.
If its predictions are repeatedly confirmed in different experimental contexts, then it may help to form a new scientific theory about the relationship between mind and matter. But even if it is spectacularly well confirmed and becomes a full-blown theory, it would still not provide metaphysical or ontological closure.
As a scientific theory it would always be open to revision, or to complete rejection when a better theory came along. Scientific theories are by their nature provisional and incomplete descriptions of our observations; they tell us nothing definitive about the nature of reality itself.
Quantum physics is an exemplary case of a scientific theory that is highly predictive and rigorously testable yet famously leaves us wondering what reality really is and why it behaves so weirdly.
So, it doesn’t matter how absurd — or even silly — the central proposal in What Matter Feels seems to be. That is not scientifically relevant. What is important is whether it can generate falsifiable hypotheses and novel predictions that researchers can experimentally test using available tools and methods.
What counts is its ability to explain our observations more comprehensively and more economically than we can with the alternative frameworks.
In the book, I show how the central proposal meets all these scientific criteria. I make several novel predictions, show how they could be tested in systems as simple as springs and as complex as brains, and discuss how it could explain many things we observe.
It is for these reasons that I claim the framework outlined in the book is genuinely scientific, and therefore merits being tested.