Come Out Wherever You Are: In Search of Consciousness

Panpsychism is the lightly subscribed philosophical position that consciousness is a property of all matter, large and small, simple and complex, alive and inert. According to panpsychism mind is everywhere. 

Eliminativism is the view that consciousness, at least what most of us consider our mind’s eye access to reality (phenomenal consciousness), exists quite literally nowhere, not even in our brains. According to this view, consciousness and its associated qualia are illusions.

Between panpsychism and eliminativism there are quite a few alternative accounts of what consciousness is, but most adhere to the notion that it is demonstrably localizable and that its location is in the brain. The brain receives information inbound from Nature, which it represents and then responds to by predicting, constantly updating and predicting, how things in the world go. This general approach to consciousness is currently how most investigators in the field of consciousness studies are oriented, with several competing theories all falling within this framework.

A relatively recent addition to this collection of metaphysical/scientific positions is the view that our minds grow and exist as a dynamic amalgam of the world, our bodies, and our brains; that it extends from our bodies out into the world; that our perceptions of an “out there” do not simply represent that space but are in fact, in part, out there in space. This approach has evolved into what is now known as 4E Cognition. The four E’s stand for extended, embedded, embodied, and enacted. While pulling up short of panpsychism, it pushes out and away from the purely brain-centered view of consciousness.

This Roundtable intends to look into the debate about the where and wherefore of consciousness, with Eliminativism and 4E Cognition taken up: two fascinating and counterintuitive attempts to provide answers.