For most of the twentieth century a “brain-first” approach dominated the philosophy of consciousness. The idea was that the brain is the thing we really understand, through neuroscience, and the task of the philosopher is try to understand how that thing “gives rise” to subjective experience: to the inner world of colours, smells and sounds that each of us knows in our own case. This philosophical project has not gone all that well–nobody has provided even the beginnings of a satisfying solution to what David Chalmers called “the hard problem” of consciousness.

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Are electrons conscious?
By.Dr.Mahboob ali Khan Phd
For most of the twentieth century a “brain-first” approach dominated
the philosophy of consciousness. The idea was that the brain is the thing
we really understand, through neuroscience, and the task of the
philosopher is try to understand how that thing “gives rise” to
subjective experience: to the inner world of colours, smells and sounds
that each of us knows in our own case. This philosophical project has
not gone all that well–nobody has provided even the beginnings of a
satisfying solution to what David Chalmers called “the hard problem”
of consciousness. More recently a quiet revolution has been occurring
in philosophy of mind which aims to turn the brain-first approach on
its head. According to the view that has come to be known as
“Russellian monism,” physical science tell us surprisingly little about
nature of the brain (more on this below). It is the nature
of consciousness that we really understand–through being conscious–
and hence the philosophical task is to build our picture of the brain
around our understanding of consciousness. We might call this a
“consciousness-first” approach to the mind-body problem. The general
approach has given birth to a broad family of specific theories outlined
in numerous recent publications. Suddenly progress on consciousness
looks possible.
The essence of Russellian monism
The conscious mind and the physical brain seem on the face of it to be
wildly different things. For one thing, conscious experiences involve a
wide variety of what philosophers call “phenomenal qualities.” This is
just a technical term for the qualities we find in our experience: the
redness of a red experience, the itchiness of an itch, the sensation of
spiciness. A neuroscientific description of the brain seems to leave out
these qualities. How on earth can quality-rich experience be
accommodated within soggy grey brain matter? The Russellian monist
solution, inspired by certain writings of Bertrand Russell from the
1920s, is to point out that physical science is in fact silent on the
intrinsic nature of matter, restricting itself to telling us what

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matter does. Neuroscience characterises a region of the brain in terms
of (A) its causal relationships with other brain regions/sensory
inputs/behavioural outputs and (B) its chemical constituents.
Chemistry in turns characterises those chemical constituents in terms
of (A) their causal relationships with other chemical entities and (B)
their physical constituents. Finally, physics characterises basic physical
properties in terms of their causal relationships with other basic
physical properties. Throughout the whole hierarchy of the physical
sciences we learn only about causal relationships. And yet there must
be more to be more to the nature of a physical entity, such as the
cerebellum, than its causal relationships. There must be some intrinsic
nature to the cerebellum, some way it is in and of itself independently
of what it does. About this intrinsic nature physical science remains
silent. Accepting this casts the problem of consciousness in a
completely different light, and points the way to a solution. Our initial
question was, “Where in the physical processes of the brain are the
phenomenal qualities?” Our discussion has led to another question,
“What is the intrinsic nature of physical brain processes?” The
Russellian monist proposes answering both question at once, by
identifying phenomenal properties with the intrinsic nature of (at least
some) physical brain processes. Whilst neuroscience characterises
brain processes extrinsically, in terms of what they do, in their intrinsic
nature they are forms of quality-rich consciousness.
Two Arguments for Panpsychism
Russellian monism is a general framework for unifying matter and
mind and thereby avoiding dualism: the view of Descartes that mind
and body are radically different kinds of thing. But how to fill in the
details is much debated. Many have founded it natural to extend
Russellian monism into a form of panpsychism, the view that all matter
involves experience of some form, bringing a new respectability to this
much maligned view. There are essentially two arguments for this
extension, one of which I don’t accept and one of which I do. The first
is the “intelligible emergence argument,” an ancient argument for
panpsychism championed in modern times by Galen Strawson. The
idea is that it is only by supposing that there is consciousness “all the
way down” to electrons and quarks that we can render the emergence

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of human and animal consciousness intelligible. Experience can’t
possibly emerge from the utterly non-experiential, according to
Strawson, so it must be there all along. One difficulty for this argument
is that even if we do attribute basic consciousness to the smallest bits
of the brain, it’s still not clear how to intelligibly account for the
consciousness of the brain as a whole. How do the interactions of
trillions of tiny minds produce a big mind? This is the so-called
‘combination problem’ for panpsychism, and until it is solved it’s not
obvious that the panpsychist Russellian monist has an advantage over
the non-panpsychist Russellian monist when it comes to explaining the
emergence of human and animal consciousness. I favour instead what
I call ‘the simplicity argument’ for panpsychism. Whilst in the mind-
set that physical science is giving us a complete picture of the universe,
panpsychism is implausible, as physical science doesn’t seem to be
telling us that electrons are conscious. But once we accept the basic
tenants of Russellian monism, things look quite different. Physical
science tells us nothing about the intrinsic nature of matter; indeed
arguably the only thing we know about the intrinsic nature of matter is
that some of it, i.e. the brains and humans, have a consciousness-
involving nature. From this epistemic starting point, the most simple,
parsimonious speculation is that the nature of matter outside of brains
is continuous with the nature of matter inside of brains, in also being
consciousness-involving. This may seem like an insubstantial
consideration, but science is strongly motivated by considerations of
simplicity. Special relativity, for example, is empirically equivalent to
its Lorenzian rival but favoured as a much simpler interpretation of the
data.

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Against neuro-fundamentalism
Some philosophers–I call them “neuro-fundamentalists”–think the only
way to make progress on consciousness is to do more neuroscience.
These philosophers have an exceedingly limited view of how science
operates, as though it’s simply a matter of doing the experiments and
recording the data. In fact, many significant developments in science
have arisen not from experimental findings in the lab but from a radical
reconceptualization of our picture of the universe formulated from the
comfort of an armchair. Think of the move in the Minkowski
interpretation of special relativity from thinking of space and time as
distinct things to the postulation of the single unified entity of
spacetime, or Galileo’s separation of the primary and the secondary
qualities which paved the way for mathematical physics. My hunch is
that progress on consciousness, as well of course as involving
neuroscience, will involve this kind of radical reconceptualization of
the mind, the brain, and the relationship between them. Russellian
monism looks to be a promising framework in which to do this.