The problem of creating persons (and a potential solution)
Note: This is a revised version of two articles I wrote in the worldview design training center back in early 2021. This is a conjunction of those two articles. I am currently not an idealist in the contemporary sense. I am agnostic on the question about what is the best theory of consciousness and I do not share all the opinions expressed. However I still do believe that idealism has a lot going for it as a theory of mind.
By: Kyle Alander
What is a person? Seems simple enough right? Well the more you think about it the more strange persons become. However I think the proper way to think of a person is in terms of what we would call a mind. A mind is capable of thinking, making decisions and feeling different things. In fact if you're reading this then you have a mind and have experience.
Minds are very strange because they have emotions, thoughts, hopes, and feelings but yet we can conceive of a world with no emotions no thoughts no hopes and no feelings. We can conceive of a world with no minds but yet they exist. We have an intuitive feeling that minds have an explanation for their existence. In other words there is a process of persons being created from something.
The problem is how are minds created? If we assume they don't pop into existence from nothing then there must be something in the world that at least has the power to create persons. What could this “person-making thing” be? Here are few proposals
First there is the physicalist answer. A person or a mind is a byproduct of unconscious bits of matter. Matter which is itself completely mindless. Matter isn't itself a person or a mind but rather it is “unconscious stuff” that comes together in the right pattern to then produce a mind. While this may be the correct answer to the problem this proposal itself has a BIGGER problem. This problem is termed the “hard problem of consciousness”. This hard problem is the problem of experience.
When we think or perceive things there is information processing but there is also a subjective aspect. Something is conscious if there is something it is like to be that organism but it is not about the performance of functions such as how neurons operate.
The hard problem however goes beyond the performance of functions and so even when we have explained all of the functions then we need to ask why the performance of these functions are accompanied by experience. Information processing and functioning of the brain no matter how complex can go in the dark without any inner feelings. In other words even when we fully understand the functions of neurons we are still left with WHY the function of these neurons should itself be a person or a mind. Physicalist theories assume the existence of some mind and then use it in the explanation of brain processes. For any proposed brain process or system we can always ask as to why it gives rise to experience (a mind).
The problem with physicalism and materialism is they try to construct consciousness out of things that refuse to add up to consciousness, trying to build first person experience of things experienced within our first person experience. Consciousness doesn't seem to be a process, a function a thing or a property but rather it seems to have its own category. All things are experienced in consciousness, and can never escape such a construct. Thus, the hard problem, at its core, suggests consciousness does not reduce to matter
There would be no “hard problem” if one did not conflate explanatory abstractions with concrete ontological primitives, if one did not attempt to paradoxically reduce mind to abstractions of mind. The “hard problem” is not something empirically observed but the direct result of internal contradictions in the logico-conceptual framework of physicalism. Thus physicalism cannot solve the problem of creating persons. The attempt by physicalism to solve the problem leads to a bigger problem.
Second there is the panpsychist answer. On panpsychism matter is itself conscious. The world is made of pixels of experience that come together to form persons. So on this view a bunch of “conscious stuff” comes together to form a person or a mind. Unfortunately just like physicalism this view also faces a bigger problem which is the “combination problem”. The notion of fundamental subatomic particles having consciousness would lead to small pixels of experience and not necessarily of an unified experiencer. While it's true that bodies are made of subatomic particles this doesn’t say anything about the structure of an experiencer. Subatomic particles are the pixels of the observable movements of consciousness not necessarily the building blocks of consciousness itself. So under panpsychism this would necessarily imply that our unified experience is itself small pixels of experience and thus you have a contradiction in the structure of the experiencer.
What is similar to both physicalism and panpsychism is the idea that consciousness is a bottom-up process. They are both on the assumption that the “person-making thing” is a bottom up process rather than a top-down process. I believe any bottom-up view will face logic-conceptual problems.
What about other options such as substance dualism, neutral monism, cosmophycism and idealism? These views are what I would I would call “top-down approaches” to solving the problem of creating persons.
Let's first look at substance dualism. A common objection to dualism is the interaction problem. But this problem isn't about creating persons. It's about how two ontologically different substances can interact. While more can be said about this problem it is not relevant to the problem of creating persons. The “problem” for dualism is HOW is a person or a soul made in the first place? If we say that God creates persons or souls what is this process? Does God take “soul stuff” and put it together into persons? If that's the case then I don't see how this does not just face the combination problem in disguise. One objection may be that the combination problem isn't an issue if God is involved since he is omnipotent and can create things ex nihilo. However no explanatory link is given between the soul and God.
One link is that God actualizes things to exist. This idea is perhaps helpful and I believe it brings us great insight since God as pure actuality may do this. But we are still left with what kind of process this happens through. Does God use the contents of his own imagination? It would seem that God may actualize things to exist in the same way our own minds can actualize thoughts to appear in our minds.
If we think of creation as a process of God's imagination then I think this may partially solve the problem of creating persons in the sense that we can have a grasp at how God creates. While I believe this can answer as to how created our physical universe with its geometric forms and the inanimate objects we see, the important aspect is still left unsolved. The important aspect is how God created minds other than himself. Since minds have thoughts, feelings, emotions and experiences they are not merely like inanimate objects. They have an important sense of value and act on their own free will. Most importantly minds work through agent causation and not merely event causation. Inanimate objects have event causation by just going with the causal chain of everything else they interact with. But minds have agent causation and can do actions which are not predetermined.
So it seems that appealing to creation ex nihilo doesn't fully solve this but only partially. As the main link of actualization only seems to account for inanimate objects and not persons. There is still something missing in the puzzle. We solved half of it but now comes the “harder part” of the problem. This is the problem for how persons came to exist and why God wouldn't just create a universe with no persons. So we are still left with the original problem and substance dualism or any kind of dualism (hylomorphism included) does not have an answer it seems
The next proposal is neutral monism. Neutral monism however faces two critical problems. The problem of experience and the problem of mentalism suspicion. The problem of experience is akin to the hard problem of consciousness. That is that it doesn't seem consciousness can reduce to ANYTHING not even a neutral substance. Secondly the mentalism suspicion is that it is suspicious that the mind is a neutral substance. It seems when neutral monist talk about the mind they are not talking about anything neutral. Because of these problems neutral monism doesn't seem to be sustainable on its own. Either it collapses to a mental monism (aka idealism) where the neutral substance is actually a mental substance or it collapses to a “neutral dualism” where there is a mental and neutral substance. If either of these cases are true then we need to examine those options since neutral monism falls into those camps. We already looked at dualisms and found them to lack an answer. So we have to go down to the very last ones
The very last options to explore is idealism and cosmophysism. Idealism is mental monism, that is that the world is just experiences. One could think of idealism as a type of dream world where the felt qualities and sensations we experience every day are ALL THERE IS. That there is nothing beyond those felt qualities. You experience properties. You experience mental phenomena like color, sounds, textures, forms, feelings, etc. What you experience is properties, not physical objects directly. So it is similar to a dream world where it is literally just the experiences one is having and nothing else. Idealism would imply some sort of bundle theory. Bundle Theory is the idea that physical objects just exist as a collection of properties. And if you remove the properties, there is nothing left to describe an object. Think of an apple. You can describe it as red, round, hard, shiny, and tasty. However, if you remove all of these in principle sensible properties, what are you left with to describe the object? You lack a material substance to account for the apple. Instead, you experience it purely in terms of in principle sensible properties. When you remove these in principle sensible properties then nothing is left. So on idealism everything is constituted by universal consciousness and we live in its dream
Cosmophycism is the closest to idealism in the sense that the whole universe is conscious. The cosmos as a whole is a bearer of consciousness as opposed to being constituted by consciousness. So on this view the cosmos is itself beyond consciousness but it is the carrier of consciousness. So just like panpsychism the physical world is the carrier of consciousness. However instead of consciousness being simply within pixels of experience the cosmos as a whole is one giant carrier of universal consciousness. And just like physicalism and dualism there is still a world that is beyond and independent of consciousness.
Now these proposals are interesting because they both have one important thing in common. When they are explaining how persons are made they approach it from a top-down perspective. The one barrier to the top-down perspective is called the constitution problem: How a cosmic experience can constitute into ordinary macroexperiences like us. First, cosmopsychism seems to have it harder in the sense of having to attach consciousness to matter and then de-constitute it into smaller parts. That is you start off with cosmic consciousness to then de-constitute it into persons. As for the idealist they can deny that minds are constituted by experiences. Instead macroexperiences are fragmented from the cosmic experiences. It's not that they are constituted but rather they are de-constituted.
Perhaps the greatest advantage to idealism is we already have REAL LIFE examples of consciousness being de-constituted. Dream characters and people with dissociative identity disorder are natural examples of the de-constitution of consciousness. As quoted from multiple papers about dreams...
“A self-organizing system allows for the self and the world in both states to be integrated. Accordingly, when a degree of loss of this self-organization occurs, de-differentation of the waking and dreaming states may ensue, fostering a perception of loss of self, as occurs during episodes of depersonalization.”
“We suggest that such “dream-like” experiences infiltrate waking consciousness to create an experience of unreality that is expressed as dissociative experiences and symptoms.”
“Dreamlike phenomena, which are ordinarily confined to sleep, thus intrude into waking consciousness and are expressed as dissociative symptoms, including depersonalization and derealization, and, in the extreme case, identity fragmentation evident in DID."
“It may seem that we are at risk of overstating the primacy of dream origins to make the point here. Clearly these dissociative processes for both cognition and personality compensation do go on quietly outside REM. However the discrete, autonomous, personification of these processes is normally a REM phenomena and it seems to take early trauma to disrupt this boundary.”
"Dreaming may even be a more literal precursor whose physiologic mechanisms for amnesia and the manufacture of alternate identities are recruited in the development of MPD.”
"The claim here is not that dream characters are the only antecedents of MPD alters, but that they are the strongest. Certainly imaginary companions and other waking fantasy content are somewhat analogous, but dreams universally feature formed, autonomous characters of hallucinatory vividness. Fantasized characters rarely surprise - much less frighten - their authors while dream characters routinely do so.”
Sources:
The point isn't a lesson about dreams but this may offer clues into really solving the problem of creating persons. If dream characters are conscious beings as inferred from these experiments then I believe taking this approach may solve the problem entirely. If (at least temporary) conscious minds are created from our dream state then we can infer something similar to Gods consciousness and explaining our own existence and thus solving the problem of creating persons. This is best made sense on an idealistic view of the world rather than cosmophyicism. On idealism persons are nothing but disassociated alters of consciousness, a person is just an alter. Idealists acknowledge that there is a world outside and independent of their personal (dissociated) alters. They simply do not acknowledge that this world is ontologically distinct from consciousness itself. Indeed, acknowledging that dissociation in universal consciousness implies a world outside their own personal mentation, idealists look upon this world in a way entirely compatible with science and a realist picture of the world
So in conclusion this is my preferred solution to the problem. The problem of creating persons is solved by a de-constitution of universal consciousness through a top-down process in the same way that we will de-constitute our own consciousness (temporarily) when we sleep. The dream characters we interact with in dreams are de-constitutions of ourselves and in the waking world we are all de-constitutions of God. So we would all be dream characters experiencing the world within Gods mind. This doesn't imply God is sleeping somewhere but rather that reality would unfold through this process. God's creation departs from himself through causal unfolding. Basically, since God is unbounded and simple so when God "loosens" or "lets go" it unwounds and progressively deviates from its most simple and complete state. This would create persons through a process of disassociation and de-constitution of consciousness. The persons formed though this process would then have mental boundaries (disassociated alters) that can form personality throughout their life and be their own unique self. Seeing it like this solves the problem completely
Now a word of caution...I'm not saying this is the only solution to the problem. It is my opinion to be the best one but readers are happy to disagree with my conclusion on this. I am only putting this solution out as a proposal to the problem and I don't claim that every other perspective is wrong. I just think it has advantages over the alternative solutions given that it has an empirical basis and doesn't face logic-conceptual problems. People can believe what they think is true and there is plenty of room for disagreement.
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