What do physicists mean by ‘experience’?
Physicists frequently refer to the ‘experiences’ or ‘feelings’ of matter yet deny that matter experiences or feels anything at all. Is this a problem for science, or an opportunity?
Some readers of the book What Matter Feels have objected to the suggestion that matter can experience or feel anything. Matter—these objectors confidently assert—is entirely insentient. Attributing psychological states of pleasure or displeasure to atoms or molecules, they say, is a form of naive animism or scientifically impotent panpsychism.
This objection overlooks several things, not least the fact that we, along with many other creatures, are made of atoms and molecules yet are clearly sentient. It also sits uneasily with the way physicists habitually refer to the ‘experiences’ and ‘feelings’ of matter when explaining its behaviour—and surely we should take seriously what physicists say about matter!
The Experiences of Matter
An early example of a physicist referring to the ‘experience’ of a material object is James Clerk Maxwell in his book Matter and Motion, published in 1877, where he says “…the ball experiences a force in the direction opposite to its relative motion.”
In his Lectures on Physics published in 1964, Richard Feynman defines the quantities inherent in the electromagnetic field “…in terms of the forces that are felt by a [test] charge…” at any point in the field. Physicists assume these quantities exist at that point in the field, he says, whether the test charge is there to “feel” it or not.
It is not only physicists who use this kind of language about matter. The neuroscientist Dr Rachel Barr—in a recent video discussing the relativistic properties of charged particles on her hugely popular TikTok channel—is even more anthropomorphic about a particle’s ‘experience’ [See image below, left and middle].
The Desires of Matter
Saying that matter ‘experiences’ or ‘feels’ forces is one thing. But what about saying that it ‘wants’ or ‘desires’ or ‘prefers’ to be in one state rather than another? Is it not taking the anthropomorphising of matter to an absurd extreme to imply that a ball or a charged particle has wishes, volitional states or preferences?
We don’t have to look hard for examples of physicists, and indeed scientists from many fields, referring to the behaviour of matter in exactly this way. In the same video, Dr Rachel Barr refers to what the particles ‘want’ to do when subjected to the field of an opposing charge [See image below, right].
Three frames from a TikTok video by the neuroscientist Dr Rachel Barr in which she explains the relativistic behaviour of charged particles in the brain. In the left and middle frames she discusses how the experience of the particle varies depending on its relation to surrounding charges. In the right frame she attributes ‘wanting’ to the particle. This illustrates the widespread habit among scientists of describing matter in general as having sentience and volition (For full video see @drrachelbarr).
An Awkward Problem for Science
I’ve asked many physicists, chemists (who sometimes talk of ‘happy’ and ‘unhappy’ chemical reactions) and neuroscientists what they mean by using psychologically-laden terms such as ‘experience’ and ‘wants’ about electrons, atoms, ions and molecules. The answer is usually the same. They do not mean to attribute sentience to matter. Such terms, they say, are no more than convenient figures of speech, or loose analogies, that aid explanation and should not be taken literally or seriously.
But this is a cardinal case of having your cake and eating it. On one hand, scientists imply that matter is inherently sentient and volitional because doing so is explanatory convenient. On the other hand, they deny that matter is sentient or volitional because it invites the taint of animism or panpsychism.
This leaves physics—and the sciences more widely—with an awkward problem. How can we take the statements of scientists about the nature and behaviour of matter seriously when they themselves do not?
An Opportunity not a Problem
Fortunately I think this is a problem we can turn into an opportunity. Rather than affirming and then denying matter’s sentient nature we should use the tools of science to investigate whether matter is sentient or not.
If matter seems to act as if it experiences or wants things, and if describing it in that way is explanatorily useful, then it is perfectly reasonable use the scientific method to find out whether this appearance has any foundation in reality.
We have an opportunity to do this, I argue in What Matter Feels, by using newly defined psychological properties of matter such as ‘experience’, ‘will’, ‘pleasure’ and ‘displeasure’, giving them precisely measurable units, and studying them experimentally to try and better explain how matter behaves.
Not a Metaphysical Claim
Crucially, this is not the same as asserting that ‘matter has mind’; this is not a metaphysical claim that balls or particles do experience or feel. Some people who have read What Matter Feels have taken me to be asserting this, despite my consistent denials. No. As things stand, we cannot say definitively whether matter has sentient properties, and even if it does we have not yet agreed how to define and measure them.
What I am saying is that for scientific purposes, and scientific purposes only, we hypothesise that matter in general has certain psychological properties that exist in parallel to the well known physical ones and which can be provisionally defined. Moreover, we can hypothesise that both kinds of properties play a role in the matter’s ‘psychophysical’ behaviour. These are no more than rational and testable proposals.
Testing the Experiences of Matter
Equipped with this hypothesis and the newly proposed (and highly provisional) definitions, we can now carry out the relevant experiments and see from the results whether we have gained any explanatory purchase. If not, then we must go back and revise the hypothesis and definitions and try again.
If, however, the hypothesis were to be experimentally confirmed and explanatorily fruitful then the payoff would be substantial for many areas of science, and indeed for our understanding of nature more generally. We would have made significant progress in resolving one of the deepest and most intractable problems we know, namely how to explain the relationship between mind and matter, or psychology and physics. In my view, this alone is sufficient reason to conduct the experiments.
So, why not study the putative experiences of balls and the desires of charged particles using the tools and methods of science, albeit supplemented by some newly defined properties? We may discover that we already know more about the fundamental nature of mind than we realise, or are yet willing to admit.
About the book
What Matter Feels: Consciousness, Energy and Physics (How Science can Explain Minds) is a new book https://mybook.to/mk6s that sets out a scientific framework for studying consciousness. It is available in eBook, paperback and hardback formats from Amazon and other outlets. The book is accompanied by a series of poster artworks available at https://pepperell.art that celebrate and promote the ideas discussed in the book. Part of the proceeds from the book and poster sales will support interdisciplinary research into the nature of consciousness.