Panpsychism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism 

 

Illustration of the Neoplatonic concept of the World Soul emanating from The Absolute, in some ways a precursor to modern panpsychism

In philosophy of mind, panpsychism is the view that mind or a mind-like aspect is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality. It is also described as a theory that "the mind is a fundamental feature of the world which exists throughout the universe." It is one of the oldest philosophical theories, and has been ascribed to philosophers including Thales, Plato, Spinoza, Leibniz, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, and Galen Strawson. In the 19th century, panpsychism was the default philosophy of mind in Western thought, but it saw a decline in the mid-20th century with the rise of logical positivism. Recent interest in the hard problem of consciousness has revived interest in panpsychism.

Overview

Etymology

The term panpsychism /panˈsʌɪkɪz(ə)m/,/pænˈsaɪ(ˌ)kɪz(ə)m/ comes from the Greek pan (πᾶν : "all, everything, whole") and psyche (ψυχή: "soul, mind"). "Psyche" comes from the Greek word ψύχω (psukhō, "I blow") and may mean life, soul, mind, spirit, heart, or "life-breath". The use of "psyche" is controversial because it is synonymous with "soul", a term usually taken to refer to something supernatural; more common terms now found in the literature include mind, mental properties, mental aspect, and experience.

Concept

Panpsychism holds that mind or a mind-like aspect is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality. It is also described as a theory that "the mind is a fundamental feature of the world which exists throughout the universe". Panpsychists posit that the type of mentality we know through our own experience is present, in some form, in a wide range of natural bodies. This notion has taken on a wide variety of forms. Some historical and non-Western panpsychists ascribe attributes such as life or spirits to all entities. Contemporary academic proponents, however, hold that sentience or subjective experience is ubiquitous, while distinguishing these qualities from more complex human mental attributes. So they ascribe a primitive form of mentality to entities at the fundamental level of physics but do not ascribe mentality to most aggregate things, such as rocks or buildings.

Terminology

The philosopher David Chalmers, who has explored panpsychism as a viable theory, distinguishes between microphenomenal experiences (the experiences of microphysical entities) and macrophenomenal experiences (the experiences of larger entities, such as humans).

Philip Goff draws a distinction between panexperientialism and pancognitivism. In the form of panpsychism under discussion in the contemporary literature, conscious experience is present everywhere at a fundamental level, hence the term panexperientialism. Pancognitivism, by contrast, is the view that thought is present everywhere at a fundamental level—a view that had some historical advocates, but no present-day academic adherents. Contemporary panpsychists do not believe microphysical entities have complex mental states such as beliefs, desires, and fears.

Originally, the term panexperientialism had a narrower meaning, having been coined by David Ray Griffin to refer specifically to the form of panpsychism used in process philosophy (see below).

History

Antiquity

Two iwakura – a rock where a kami or spirit is said to reside in the religion of Shinto

Panpsychist views are a staple in pre-Socratic Greek philosophy. According to Aristotle, Thales (c. 624 – 545 BCE), the first Greek philosopher, posited a theory which held "that everything is full of gods." Thales believed that magnets demonstrated this. This has been interpreted as a panpsychist doctrine. Other Greek thinkers associated with panpsychism include Anaxagoras (who saw the underlying principle or arche as nous or mind), Anaximenes (who saw the arche as pneuma or spirit) and Heraclitus (who said "The thinking faculty is common to all").

Plato argues for panpsychism in his Sophist, in which he writes that all things participate in the form of Being and that it must have a psychic aspect of mind and soul (psyche). In the Philebus and Timaeus, Plato argues for the idea of a world soul or anima mundi. According to Plato:

This world is indeed a living being endowed with a soul and intelligence ... a single visible living entity containing all other living entities, which by their nature are all related.

Stoicism developed a cosmology that held that the natural world is infused with the divine fiery essence pneuma, directed by the universal intelligence logos. The relationship between beings' individual logos and the universal logos was a central concern of the Roman Stoic Marcus Aurelius. The metaphysics of Stoicism finds connections with Hellenistic philosophies such as Neoplatonism. Gnosticism also made use of the Platonic idea of anima mundi.

Renaissance

Illustration of the Cosmic order by Robert Fludd, where the World Soul is depicted as a woman

After Emperor Justinian closed Plato's Academy in 529 CE, neoplatonism declined. Though there were mediaeval Christian thinkers, such as John Scotus Eriugena, who ventured what might be called panpsychism, it was not a dominant strain in Christian thought. But in the Italian Renaissance, it enjoyed something of a revival in the thought of figures such as Gerolamo Cardano, Bernardino Telesio, Francesco Patrizi, Giordano Bruno, and Tommaso Campanella. Cardano argued for the view that soul or anima was a fundamental part of the world, and Patrizi introduced the term panpsychism into philosophical vocabulary. According to Bruno, "There is nothing that does not possess a soul and that has no vital principle." Platonist ideas resembling the anima mundi also resurfaced in the work of esoteric thinkers such as Paracelsus, Robert Fludd, and Cornelius Agrippa.

Early modern period

In the 17th century, two rationalists, Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz, can be said to be panpsychists. In Spinoza's monism, the one single infinite and eternal substance is "God, or Nature" (Deus sive Natura), which has the aspects of mind (thought) and matter (extension). Leibniz's view is that there are infinitely many absolutely simple mental substances called monads that make up the universe's fundamental structure. While it has been said that George Berkeley's idealist philosophy is also a form of panpsychism, Berkeley rejected panpsychism and posited that the physical world exists only in the experiences minds have of it, while restricting minds to humans and certain other specific agents.

19th century

In the 19th century, panpsychism was at its zenith. Philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer, C.S. Peirce, Josiah Royce, William James, Eduard von Hartmann, F.C.S. Schiller, Ernst Haeckel and William Kingdon Clifford as well as psychologists such as Gustav Fechner, Wilhelm Wundt and Rudolf Hermann Lotze all promoted panpsychist ideas.

Arthur Schopenhauer argued for a two-sided view of reality as both Will and Representation (Vorstellung). According to Schopenhauer, "All ostensible mind can be attributed to matter, but all matter can likewise be attributed to mind".

Josiah Royce, the leading American absolute idealist, held that reality is a "world self", a conscious being that comprises everything, though he didn't necessarily attribute mental properties to the smallest constituents of mentalistic "systems". The American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce espoused a sort of psycho-physical monism in which the universe is suffused with mind, which he associated with spontaneity and freedom. Following Pierce, William James also espoused a form of panpsychism. In his lecture notes, James wrote:

Our only intelligible notion of an object in itself is that it should be an object for itself, and this lands us in panpsychism and a belief that our physical perceptions are effects on us of 'psychical' realities

In 1893, Paul Carus proposed a philosophy similar to panpsychism, "panbiotism", according to which "everything is fraught with life; it contains life; it has the ability to live."

20th century

In the 20th century, panpsychism's most significant proponent is arguably Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947). Whitehead's ontology saw the basic nature of the world as made up of events and the process of their creation and extinction. These elementary events (which he called occasions) are in part mental. According to Whitehead, "we should conceive mental operations as among the factors which make up the constitution of nature."

Bertrand Russell's neutral monist views tended toward panpsychism. The physicist Arthur Eddington also defended a form of panpsychism. The psychologist Carl Jung, who is known for his idea of the collective unconscious, wrote that "psyche and matter are contained in one and the same world, and moreover are in continuous contact with one another", and that it was probable that "psyche and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing". The psychologists James Ward and Charles Augustus Strong also endorsed variants of panpsychism.

The geneticist Sewall Wright endorsed a version of panpsychism. He believed that the birth of consciousness was not due to a mysterious property of increasing complexity, but rather an inherent property, implying the most elementary particles have these properties.

Contemporary

Panpsychism has recently seen a resurgence in the philosophy of mind, set into motion by Thomas Nagel's 1979 article "Panpsychism" and further spurred by Galen Strawson's 2006 realistic monist article "Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism." Other recent proponents include American philosophers David Ray Griffin and David Skrbina, British philosophers Gregg Rosenberg, Timothy Sprigge, and Philip Goff, and Canadian philosopher William Seager. The British philosopher David Papineau, while distancing himself from orthodox panpsychists, has written that his view is "not unlike panpsychism" in that he rejects a line in nature between "events lit up by phenomenology [and] those that are mere darkness."

Panpsychism has also been applied in environmental philosophy by Australian philosopher Freya Mathews.

In 1990, the physicist David Bohm published "A new theory of the relationship of mind and matter," a paper based on his interpretation of quantum mechanics. The philosopher Paavo Pylkkänen has described Bohm's view as a version of panprotopsychism.

The integrated information theory of consciousness (IIT), proposed by the neuroscientist and psychiatrist Giulio Tononi in 2004 and since adopted by other neuroscientists such as Christof Koch, postulates that consciousness is widespread and can be found even in some simple systems.

In 2019 cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman published The Case Against Reality: How evolution hid the truth from our eyes. Hoffman argues that consensus reality lacks concrete existence, and is nothing more than an evolved user-interface. He argues that the true nature of reality are abstract "conscious agents". Science editor Annaka Harris argues that panpsychism is a viable theory in her 2019 book Conscious, though she stops short of fully endorsing it.

In 2020 physicist Alessandro De Angelis proposed a panpsychic, holographic view of nature as a solution to the problem of the collapse of the wavefunction in quantum mechanics.

Varieties of panpsychism

A wide breadth of views, theories, or ontologies can be considered panpsychist; the only requirement is that experience is ubiquitous.

Philosophical frameworks

In theory, panpsychism is compatible with all four of the above frameworks.

Cosmopsychism

Cosmopsychism hypothosizes that the cosmos is a unified object that is ontologically prior to its parts. It has been described as an alternative to panpsychism, or as a form of panpsychism. Proponents of cosmopsychism claim that the cosmos as a whole is the fundamental level of reality and that it instantiates consciousness. They differ on that point from panpsychists, who usually claim that the smallest level of reality is fundamental and instantiates consciousness. Accordingly, human consciousness, for example, merely derives from a larger cosmic consciousness.

Idealism

According to the philosophers William Segear and Sean Allen-Hermenson, "idealists are panpsychists by default". But idealism differs from other forms of panpsychism in some key ways. Both hold that everything that exists has some form of experience. Normally, panpsychists come to this conclusion by believing that things in the external world, such as elections or bits, have some rudimentary form of experience. In contrast, idealists hold that everything that exists has experience by simply denying the external world exists in the first place. Chalmers also contrasts panpsychism with idealism (as well as materialism and dualism). Uwe Meixner argues that panpsychism has both dualistic and idealist forms.^[42] He further divides the latter into "atomistic idealistic panpsychism," which he ascribes to David Hume, and "holistic idealistic panpsychism," which he favors.

Neutral monism

Neutral monism rejects the dichotomy of mind and matter, instead taking a neutral third variable as fundamental. Just what that third variable is is up for debate, and many choose to leave it undefined. This has lead to a variety of different formulations of neutral monism, many of which broadly overlap with other philosophies. In The Conscious Mind, Chalmers writes that, in some instances, the differences between "Russell's neutral monism" and his property dualism are merely semantic. In versions of neutral monism in which the fundamental constituents of the world are neither mental nor physical, it is quite distinct from panpsychism. In versions where the fundamental constituents are both mental and physical, neutral monism may lead to panpsychism, panprotopsychism, or dual aspect theory. Goff believes that neutral monism can reasonably be regarded as a form of panpsychism "in so far as it is a dual aspect view." Neutral monism, panpsychism, and dual aspect theory may be conflated or used interchangeably in some contexts.

Panexperientialism

Panexperientialism is associated with the philosophies of, among others, Charles Hartshorne and Alfred North Whitehead, although the term itself was invented by David Ray Griffin in order to distinguish the process philosophical view from other varieties of panpsychism. Whitehead's process philosophy argues that the fundamental elements of the universe are "occasions of experience," which can together create something as complex as a human being. Building off Whitehead's work, process philosopher Michel Weber argues for a pancreativism. Goff has used the term panexperientialism more generally to refer to forms of panpsychism in which experience rather than thought is ubiquitous.

Panprotopsychism

pan (πᾶν : "all, everything, whole"); proto (πρῶτος : “first”); and psyche (ψυχή: "soul, mind").

Panprotopsychists believe that higher-order phenomenal properties (such as qualia) are logically entailed by protophenomenial properties, at least in principle. The combination problem thus holds no weight; it is not phenomenal properties that are pervasive, but protophenomenal properties. And protophenomenal properties are by definition the constituent parts of consciousness. Chalmers argues that the view faces difficulty in dealing with the combination problem. He considers Russell's proposed solution "ad hoc", and believes it diminishes the parsimony that made the theory initially interesting.

Russellian monism

Russellian monism is a type of neutral monism. The theory is attributed to Bertrand Russell, and may also be called Russell's panpsychism, or Russell's neutral monism. Russell believed that all causal properties are extrinsic manifestations of identical intrinsic properties. Russell called these identical internal properties quiddities. Just as the extrinsic properties of matter can form higher-order structure, so can their corresponding and identical quiddities. Russell believed the conscious mind was one such structure.

Religious or mystical ontologies

Advaita Vedānta

Advaita Vedānta is a form of idealism in Indian philosophy which views consensus reality as illusory. Anand Vaidya and Purushottama Bilimoria have argued that it can be considered a form of panpsychism or cosmopsychism.

Animism and hylozoism

Animism maintains that all things have a soul, and hylozoism maintains that all things are alive. Both could reasonably be interpreted as panpsychist, but both have fallen out of favour in contemporary academia. Modern panpsychists have tried to distance themselves from theories of this sort, careful to carve out the distinction between the ubiquity of experience and the ubiquity of mind and cognition.

Buddha-nature

Who, then, is "animate" and who "inanimate"? Within the assembly of the Lotus, all are present without division. In the case of grass, trees and the soil...whether they merely lift their feet or energetically traverse the long path, they will all reach Nirvana.

— Zharan 湛然, the sixth patriarch of Tendai Buddhism(1711-82)

The term Buddha-nature is the English translation of the classical Chinese term 佛性 (or fó xìng in pinying), which is in turn a translation of the Sanskrit tathāgatagarbha. Tathāgata refers to someone (namely the Buddha) having arrived, while garbha translates into the words embryo or root.

In the art of the Japanese rock garden, the artist must be aware of the "ishigokoro" ('heart', or 'mind') of the rocks 

Broadly speaking, Buddha-nature can be defined as the ubiquitous dispositional state of being capable of obtaining Buddhahood. In some Buddhist traditions, this may be interpreted as implying a form of panpsychism. D. C. Clark, a philosopher of mind and the author of Panpsychism and the Religious Attitude, argues that most "traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean philosophy would qualify as panpsychist in nature."

The Huayan, Tiantai, and Tendai schools of Buddhism explicitly attributed Buddha-nature to inanimate objects such as lotus flowers and mountains. Similarly, Soto Zen master Dogen argued that "insentient beings expound" the teachings of the Buddha, and wrote about the "mind" (心,shin) of "fences, walls, tiles, and pebbles". The 9th-century Shingon Buddhist thinker Kukai went so far as to argue that natural objects such as rocks and stones are part of the supreme embodiment of the Buddha. According to Clark, Buddha-nature is best described "in western terms" as something "psychophysical."

Scientific theories

Conscious realism

It is a natural and near-universal assumption that the world has the properties and causal structures that we perceive it to have; to paraphrase Einstein's famous remark, we naturally assume that the moon is there whether anyone looks or not. Both theoretical and empirical considerations, however, increasingly indicate that this is not correct.

— Donald Hoffman, Conscious agent networks: Formal analysis and applications to cognition, p. 2

Conscious realism is the work of Donald Hoffman, a cognitive scientist specialising in perception. He has written numerous papers on the topic which he summarised in his 2019 book The Case Against Reality: How evolution hid the truth from our eyes. Conscious realism builds upon Hoffman's former User-Interface Theory. In combination they argue that (1) consensus reality and spacetime are illusory, and are merely a "species specific evolved user interface"; (2) Reality is made of a complex, dimensionless, and timeless network of "conscious agents".

The consensus view is that perception is a reconstruction of one's environment. Hoffman views perception as a construction of rather than a reconstruction. He argues that perceptual systems as analogous to information channels, and thus subject to data compression. The set of possible representations for any given data set is quite large. Of that set, the subset that is homomorphic is minuscule, and does not overlap with the subset that is efficient or easiest to use. Hoffman offers the "fitness beats truth theorem" as mathematical proof that perceptions of reality bear no resemblance to realities true nature.

Even if reality is an illusion, Hoffman takes consciousness as an indisputable fact. He represents rudimentary units of consciousness (which he calls "conscious agents") as Markovien kernels. Though the theory was not initially panpsychist, he reports that he and his college Chetan Prakash found the math to be more parsimonious if it were. They hypothesize that reality is composed of these conscious agents, who interact to form "larger, more complex" networks.

Axioms and postulates of integrated information theory

Integrated information theory

Giulio Tononi first articulated Integrated information theory (IIT) in 2004, and it has undergone two major revisions since then. Tononi approaches consciousness from a scientific perspective, and has expressed frustration with philosophical theories of consciousness for lacking predictive power. Though integral to his theory, he refrains from philosophical terminology such as qualia or the unity of consciousness, instead opting for mathematically precise alternatives like entropy function and information integration. This has allowed Tononi to create measurement for integrated information, which he calls phi (Φ). He believes consciousness is nothing but integrated information, so Φ measures consciousness. As it turns out, even basic objects or substances have a nonzero degree of Φ. This would mean that consciousness is ubiquitous, albeit to a minimal degree.

The philosopher Hedda Hassel Mørch's views IIT as similar to Russellian monism, while other philosophers, such as Chalmers and John Searle, consider it a form of panpsychism. IIT does not hold that all systems are conscious, leading Tononi and Koch to state that IIT incorporates some elements of panpsychism but not others. Koch has called IIT a "scientifically refined version" of panpsychism.

Arguments in favor of panpsychism

Hard problem of consciousness

But what consciousness is, we know not; and how it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as the result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djin when Aladdin rubbed his lamp in the story, or as any other ultimate fact of nature.

— Thomas Henry Huxley (1896)

It feels like something to be a human brain. This means that matter, when organised in a particular way, begins to have an experience. The questions of why and how this material structure has experience, and why it has that particular experience rather than another experience, are known as the hard problem of consciousness. The term is attributed to Chalmers. He argues that even after "all the perceptual and cognitive functions within the vicinity" of consciousness" are accounted for, "there may still remain a further unanswered question: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience?" Though Chalmers gave the hard problem of consciousness its present name, similar views had been expressed before. Isaac Newton, John Locke, Gottfried Libniz, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Henry Huxley, Wilhelm Wundt, all wrote about the seeming incompatibility of third-person functional descriptions of mind and matter and first-person conscious experience. Similar sentiments have been articulated through philosophical inquiries such as the problem of other minds, solipsism, the explanatory gap, philosophical zombies, and Mary's room. These problems have caused Chalmers to consider panpsychism a viable solution to the hard problem, though he is not committed to any single view.

Garrett Johnson has compared the hard problem to vitalism, the now discredited hypothesis that life is inexplicable and can only be understood if some vital life force exists. He maintains that given time, consciousness and its evolutionary origins will be understood just as life is now understood. Daniel Dennett has called the hard problem a "hunch," and maintains that conscious experience, as it is usually understood, is merely a complex cognitive illusion. Patricia Churchland, also an eliminative materialist, maintains that philosophers ought to be more patient: neuroscience is still in its early stages, so Chalmers's hard problem is premature. Clarity will come from learning more about the brain, not from metaphysical speculation.

Panpsychist solutions

In The Conscious Mind (1996), Chalmers attempts to pinpoint why the hard problem is so hard. He concludes that consciousness is irreducible to lower-level physical facts, just as the fundamental laws of physics are irreducible to lower-level physical facts. Therefore, consciousness should be taken as fundamental in its own right and studied as such. Just as fundamental properties of reality are ubiquitous (even small objects have mass), consciousness may also be, though he believes it's too soon to say for certain.

In Mortal Questions (1979), Thomas Nagel argues that panpsychism follows from four premises:

• P1: There is no spiritual plane or disembodied soul; everything that exists is material.
• P2: Consciousness is irreducible to lower-level physical properties.
• P3: Consciousness exists.
• P4: Higher-order properties of matter (i.e., emergent properties) can, at least in principle, be reduced to their lower-level properties.

Before the first premise is accepted, the range of possible explanations for consciousness is fully open. Each premise, if accepted, narrows down that range of possibilities. If the argument is sound, then by the last premise panpsychism is the only possibility left.

• If (P1) is true, then either consciousness does not exist, or it exists within the physical world.
• If (P2) is true, then either consciousness does not exist, or it (a) exists as distinct property of matter or (b) is fundamentally entailed by matter.
• If (P3) is true, then consciousness exists, and is either (a) its own property of matter or (b) composed by the matter of the brain but not logically entailed by it.
• If (P4) is true, then (b) is false, and consciousness must be its own unique property of matter.

Therefore, consciousness is its own unique property of matter and panpsychism is true.

The problem of substance

Physics is mathematical, not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little: it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover. For the rest our knowledge is negative.

— Bertrand Russell, An Outline of Philosophy (1927)

Rather than solely trying to solve the problem of consciousness, Russell also attempted to solve the problem of substance, also known as the problem of infinite regress.

(1) Like many sciences, physics describes the world through mathematics. Unlike other sciences, physics cannot describe what Schopenhauer called the "object that grounds" mathematics. Economics is grounded in resources being allocated, and population dynamics is grounded in individual people within that population. The objects that ground physics, however, can be described only through more mathematics. In Russell's words, physics describes "certain equations giving abstract properties of their changes." When it comes to describing "what it is that changes, and what it changes from and to—as to this, physics is silent." In other words, physics describes matter's extrinsic properties, but not the intrinsic properties that ground them.

(2) Russell argued that physics is mathematical because "it is only mathematical properties we can discover." This is true almost by definition: if only extrinsic properties are outwardly observable, then they will be the only ones discovered. This led Alfred North Whitehead to conclude that intrinsic properties are "intrinsically unknowable."

(3) Consciousness has many similarities to these intrinsic properties of physics. It, too, cannot be directly observed from an outside perspective. And it, too, seems to ground many observable extrinsic properties: presumably, music is enjoyable because of the experience of listening to it, and chronic pain is avoided because of the experience of pain, etc. Russell concluded that consciousness must be related to these extrinsic properties of matter. He called these intrinsic properties quiddities. Just as extrinsic physical properties can create structures, so can their corresponding and identical quiddites. The conscious mind, Russel argued, is one such structure.

Proponents of panpsychism who use this line of reasoning include Chalmers, Harris, and Strawson. Chalmers has argued that the extrinsic properties of physics must have corresponding intrinsic properties; otherwise the universe would be "a giant causal flux" with nothing for "causation to relate", which he deems a logical impossibility. He sees consciousness as a promising candidate for that role. Galen Strawson calls Russell's panpsychism "realistic physicalism." He argues that "the experiential considered specifically as such" is what it means for something to be physical. Just as mass is energy, Strawson believes that consciousness "just is" matter.

Max Tegmark, theoretical physicist and creator of the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, disagrees with these conclusions. By his account, the universe is not just describable by math but is math; comparing physics to economics or population dynamics is a disanalogy. While population dynamics may be grounded in individual people, those people are grounded in "purely mathematical objects" such as energy and charge. The universe is, in a fundamental sense, made of nothing.

The mind-body problem

Dualism makes the problem insoluble; materialism denies the existence of any phenomenon to study, and hence of any problem.

— John R. Searle, Consciousness and Language, p. 47

In Panpsychism and Protopanpsychism¹ (2015), Chalmers tackles the mind-body problem through the argumentative format of the Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis. The goal of such arguments is to argue for sides of a debate (the thesis and antithesis), weigh their vices and merits, and then reconcile them (the synthesis). His thesis and antithesis are as follows.

1. Thesis: materialism is true; everything is fundamentally physical.
2. Antithesis: dualism is true; not everything is fundamentally physical.
3. Synthesis: Panpsychism

(1) A centerpiece of Chalmers's argument is the physical world's causal closure. Newton's law of motion explains this phenomenon succinctly: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Cause and effect is a symmetrical process. There is no room for consciousness to exert any causal power on the physical world unless it is itself physical.

(2) One one hand, if consciousness is separate from the physical world then there is no room for it to exert any causal power on the world (a state of affairs philosophers call epiphenomenalism). If consciousness plays no causal role, then it is unclear how Chalmers could even write this paper. On the other hand, consciousness is irreducible to the physical processes of the brain.

(3) Panpsychism has all the benefits of materialism because it could mean that consciousness is physical while also escaping the grasp of epiphenominalism. After some argumentation Chalmers narrows it down further to Russellian monism, concluding that thoughts, actions, intentions and emotions may just be the quiddities of neurotransmitters, neurons, and glial cells.

Quantum mechanics

No one understands quantum mechanics.

— Richard Feynman

In a 2018 interview, Chalmers called quantum mechanics "a magnet for anyone who wants to find room for crazy properties of the mind," but not entirely without warrant. The relationship between observation (and, by extension, consciousness) and the wave-function collapse is known as the measurement problem. It seems that atoms, photons, etc. are in quantum superposition (which is to say, in many seemingly contradictory states or locations simultaneously) until measured in some way. This process is known as a wave-function collapse. According to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, one of the oldest interpretations and the most widely taught, it is the act of observation that collapses the wave-function. Erwin Schrödinger famously articulated the Copenhagen interpretation's unusual implications in the thought experiment now known as Schrödinger cat. He imagines that a cat, a flask of poison, radioactive material, and a Geiger counter are put in a box. If the Geiger counter notices the radioactive decay of a single atom, the flask will shatter and the cat will die. If the Geiger counter does not detect radioactive decay, the cat will live. Before it is observed, a quantum particle is in a superposition of being both in a state of decay and not in a state of decay. This means that the vial of poison will be both shattered and not shattered, and the cat will be both dead and alive. Since the act of observation collapses the wave function, this means that the cat will be both dead and alive until one opens the box and looks inside. This has raised questions about, in John S. Bell's words, "where the observer begins and ends."

The measurement problem has largely been characterised as the clash of classical physics and quantum mechanics. Bohm argued that it is rather a clash of classical physics, quantum mechanics, and phenomenology; all three levels of description seem to be difficult to reconcile, or even contradictory. Though not referring specifically to quantum mechanics, Chalmers has written that if a theory of everything is ever discovered, it will be a set of "psychophysical laws", rather than simply a set of physical laws. With Chalmers as their inspiration, Bohm and Pylkkänen set out to do just that, ergo their panprotopsychism. Chalmers, who is critical of the Copenhagen interpretation and most quantum theories of consciousness, has coined this term "the Law of the Minimisation of Mystery."

According to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, Schrödinger's cat is both dead and alive until observed or measured in some way.

The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics does not take observation as central to the wave-function collapse, because it denies that the collapse ever happens at all. On the many-worlds interpretation, just as the cat is both dead and alive, the observer both sees a dead cat and sees a living cat. Even though observation does not play a central role in this case, questions about observation are still relevant to the discussion. In Roger Penrose's words:

I do not see why a conscious being need be aware of only "one" of the alternatives in a linear superposition. What is it about consciousnesses that says that consciousness must not be "aware" of that tantalising linear combination of both a dead and a live cat? It seems to me that a theory of consciousness would be needed for one to square the many world view with what one actually observes.

Chalmers believes the tentative variant of panpsychism outlined in The Conscious Mind (1996) does just that. Leaning toward the many-worlds interpretation due to its mathematical parsimony, he believes his variety of panpsychist property dualism may be just the theory Penrose is looking for. Chalmers believes that information will play an integral role in any theory of consciousness because the mind and brain have corresponding informational structures. He considers the computational nature of physics further evidence of information's central role, and suggests that information that is physically realised is simultaneously phenomenally realised; both regularities in nature and conscious experience are expressions of information's underlying character. The theory implies panpsychism, and also solves the problem Penrose posed. On Chalmers's formulation, information in any given position is phenomenally realised, whereas the informational state of the superposition as a whole is not. Panpsychist interpretations of quantum mechanics have been put forward by such philosophers as Whitehead, Shan Gao, Michael Lockwood, and Hoffman, who is a cognitive scientist. Protopanpsychist interpretations have been put forward by Bohm and Pylkkänen.

Quantum theories of consciousness have yet to gain mainstream attention. Tegmark has formally calculated the "decoherence rates" of neurons, finding that the brain is a "classical rather than a quantum system" and that quantum mechanics does not relate "to consciousness in any fundamental way."

In his 2007 article "The Brain: The Mystery of Consciousness" Steven Pinker wrote, "to my ear, this amounts to the feeling that quantum mechanics sure is weird, and consciousness sure is weird, so maybe quantum mechanics can explain consciousness."

Arguments against panpsychism

Lack of falsifiability

One criticism of panpsychism is that it cannot be empirically tested. Chalmers has responded that while no direct evidence exists for the theory, neither is there direct evidence against it.

A corollary of this is that panpsychism has no predictive power, leaving theorists with yet fewer means of assessing its validity. Tononi and Koch write that while panpsychism integrates consciousness into the physical world in a way that is "elegantly unitary," its "beauty has been singularly barren. Besides claiming that matter and mind are one thing, it has little constructive to say and offers no positive laws explaining how the mind is organized and works."

Philosophers such as Chalmers have argued that theories of consciousness should be capable of providing insight into the brain and mind to avoid the problem of mental causation. If they fail to do that, the theory will succumb to epiphenominalism, a view commonly criticised as implausible or even self-contradictory. Proponents of panpsychism (especially those with neutral monist tendencies) hope to bypass this problem by dismissing it as a false dichotomy; mind and matter are two sides of the same coin, and mental causation is merely the extrinsic description of intrinsic properties of mind. Robert Howell has argued that all causal functions are still accounted for dispositionally (i.e., in terms of the behaviors described by science), leaving phenomenality causally inert. He concludes, "This leaves us once again with epiphenomenal qualia, only in a very surprising place." Neutral monists reject such dichotomous views of mind-body interaction.

Theoretical vice

An especially vocal critic of panpsychism, Searle has alleged that its unfalsifiability goes deeper than run-of-the-mill untestability: it is unfalsifiable because "it does not get up to the level of being false. It is strictly speaking meaningless because no clear notion has been given to the claim." The need for coherence and clarification is accepted by David Skrbina, a proponent of panpsychism.

A related criticism is what seems to many to be the theory's bizarre nature. Goff dismisses this objection: though he admits that panpsychism is counterintuitive, he notes that Einstein's and Darwin's theories are also counterintuitive. "At the end of the day," he writes, "you should judge a view not for its cultural associations but by its explanatory power."

In any case, there are other avenues of justification available to the panpsychist, such as theoretical virtues such as parsimony or simplicity. According to Chalmers, "there are indirect reasons, of a broadly theoretical character, for taking the view seriously". Even critics such as Tononi and Koch speak of panpsychism's "beauty" and "elegant unity".

Combination problem

The combination problem (also known as the binding problem) can be traced to William James, but was given its present name by William Seager in 1995. The problem arises from the tension between the seemingly irreducible nature of consciousness and its ubiquity. If consciousness is ubiquitous, then presumably every atom (or every bit, depending on the theory) will have a minimal level of it. How then, as Keith Frankish puts it, do these "tiny consciousnesses combine" to create larger conscious experiences such as "the twinge of pain" he feels in his knee? This question has proven provocative, and many have attempted to answer it. None of the proposed answers has gained widespread acceptance.

In relation to other theories

Dualism

Chalmers calls panpsychism an alternative to both materialism and dualism. Similarly, Goff calls it an alternative to both physicalism and substance dualism. Chalmers says panpsychism respects the conclusions of both the causal argument against dualism and the conceivability argument for dualism. Goff has argued that panpsychism avoids the disunity of dualism, under which mind and matter are ontologically separate, as well as dualism's problems explaining how mind and matter interact.

Physicalism and materialism

Panpsychism encompasses many theories, united by the notion that consciousness is ubiquitous; these can in principle be reductive materialist, dualist, or something else. Strawson maintains that panpsychism is a form of physicalism, on his view the only viable form. Chalmers calls panpsychism an alternative to both materialism and dualism. Similarly, Goff calls panpsychism an alternative to both physicalism and substance dualism.

Emergentism

Panpsychism is incompatible with emergentism. In general, theories of consciousness fall under one or the other umbrella; they hold either that consciousness is present at a fundamental level of reality (panpsychism) or that it emerges higher up (emergentism). The same cannot be said of panprotopsychism.

New Thought

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Thought 

The New Thought movement (also Higher Thought) is a spiritual movement that developed in the United States in the 19th century, considered by many to have been derived from the unpublished writings of Phineas Quimby. There are numerous smaller groups, most of which are incorporated in the International New Thought Alliance. The contemporary New Thought movement is a loosely allied group of religious denominations, authors, philosophers, and individuals who share a set of beliefs concerning metaphysics, positive thinking, the law of attraction, healing, life force, creative visualization, and personal power.

New Thought holds that Infinite Intelligence, or God, is everywhere, spirit is the totality of real things, true human selfhood is divine, divine thought is a force for good, sickness originates in the mind, and "right thinking" has a healing effect. Although New Thought is neither monolithic nor doctrinaire, in general, modern-day adherents of New Thought share some core beliefs:

1. God or Infinite Intelligence is "supreme, universal, and everlasting";
2. divinity dwells within each person, that all people are spiritual beings;
3. "the highest spiritual principle [is] loving one another unconditionally... and teaching and healing one another"; and
4. "our mental states are carried forward into manifestation and become our experience in daily living".

William James used the term "New Thought" as synonymous with the "Mind cure movement", in which he included many sects with diverse origins, such as idealism and Hinduism.

Overview

William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, described New Thought as follows:

...for the sake of having a brief designation, I will give the title of the "Mind-cure movement." There are various sects of this "New Thought," to use another of the names by which it calls itself; but their agreements are so profound that their differences may be neglected for my present purpose, and I will treat the movement, without apology, as if it were a simple thing.

It is an optimistic scheme of life, with both a speculative and a practical side. In its gradual development during the last quarter of a century, it has taken up into itself a number of contributory elements, and it must now be reckoned with as a genuine religious power. It has reached the stage, for example, when the demand for its literature is great enough for insincere stuff, mechanically produced for the market, to be to a certain extent supplied by publishers – a phenomenon never observed, I imagine, until a religion has got well past its earliest insecure beginnings.

One of the doctrinal sources of Mind-cure is the four Gospels; another is Emersonianism or New England transcendentalism; another is Berkeleyan idealism; another is spiritism, with its messages of "law" and "progress" and "development"; another the optimistic popular science evolutionism of which I have recently spoken; and, finally, Hinduism has contributed a strain. But the most characteristic feature of the mind-cure movement is an inspiration much more direct. The leaders in this faith have had an intuitive belief in the all-saving power of healthy-minded attitudes as such, in the conquering efficacy of courage, hope, and trust, and a correlative contempt for doubt, fear, worry, and all nervously precautionary states of mind. Their belief has in a general way been corroborated by the practical experience of their disciples; and this experience forms to-day a mass imposing in amount.

History

Origins

The New Thought movement was based on the teachings of Phineas Quimby (1802–1866), an American mesmerist and healer. Quimby had developed a belief system that included the tenet that illness originated in the mind as a consequence of erroneous beliefs and that a mind open to God's wisdom could overcome any illness. His basic premise was:

The trouble is in the mind, for the body is only the house for the mind to dwell in [...] Therefore, if your mind had been deceived by some invisible enemy into a belief, you have put it into the form of a disease, with or without your knowledge. By my theory or truth, I come in contact with your enemy, and restore you to health and happiness. This I do partly mentally, and partly by talking till I correct the wrong impression and establish the Truth, and the Truth is the cure.

During the late 19th century, the metaphysical healing practices of Quimby mingled with the "Mental Science" of Warren Felt Evans, a Swedenborgian minister. Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, has sometimes been cited as having used Quimby as inspiration for theology. Eddy was a patient of Quimby’s and shared his view that disease is rooted in a mental cause. Because of its theism, Christian Science differs from the teachings of Quimby.

In the late 19th century, New Thought was propelled by a number of spiritual thinkers and philosophers and emerged through a variety of religious denominations and churches, particularly the Unity Church and Church of Divine Science (established in 1889 and 1888, respectively), followed by Religious Science (established in 1927). Many of its early teachers and students were women; notable among the founders of the movement were Emma Curtis Hopkins, known as the "teacher of teachers", Myrtle Fillmore, Malinda Cramer, and Nona L. Brooks; with many of its churches and community centers led by women, from the 1880s to today.

It is believed that James Allen spearheaded the new thought movement in the UK from the 1890's onwards until his death in 1912.

Growth

New Thought is also largely a movement of the printed word.

Prentice Mulford, through writing Your Forces and How to Use Them, a series of essays published during 1886–1892, was pivotal in the development of New Thought thinking, including the Law of Attraction.

In 1906, William Walker Atkinson (1862–1932) wrote and published Thought Vibration or the Law of Attraction in the Thought World. Atkinson was the editor of New Thought magazine and the author of more than 100 books on an assortment of religious, spiritual, and occult topics. The following year, Elizabeth Towne, the editor of The Nautilus, published Bruce MacLelland's book Prosperity Through Thought Force, in which he summarized the "Law of Attraction" as a New Thought principle, stating "You are what you think, not what you think you are."

These magazines were used to reach a large audience then, as others are now. Nautilus magazine, for example, had 45,000 subscribers and a total circulation of 150,000. One Unity Church magazine, Wee Wisdom, was the longest-lived children's magazine in the United States, published from 1893 until 1991. Today, New Thought magazines include Daily Word published by Unity and the Religious Science magazine, Science of Mind, published by the Centers for Spiritual Living.

There are also now New Thought audiobooks including Science of Mind (2020), Your Invisible Power (2016), The Secret Door to Success (2015), From Passion to Peace (2020) and New Thought Theatre (2020) narrated by new thought narrator Hillary Hawkins.

Major gatherings

The 1915 International New Thought Alliance (INTA) conference – held in conjunction with the Panama–Pacific International Exposition, a world's fair that took place in San Francisco – featured New Thought speakers from far and wide. The PPIE organizers were so favorably impressed by the INTA convention that they declared a special "New Thought Day" at the fair and struck a commemorative bronze medal for the occasion, which was presented to the INTA delegates, led by Annie Rix Militz. By 1916, the International New Thought Alliance had encompassed many smaller groups around the world, adopting a creed known as the "Declaration of Principles". The Alliance is held together by one central teaching: that people, through the constructive use of their minds, can attain freedom, power, health, prosperity, and all good, molding their bodies as well as the circumstances of their lives. The declaration was revised in 1957, with all references to Christianity removed, and a new statement based on the "inseparable oneness of God and Man".

Beliefs

The chief tenets of New Thought are:

• Infinite Intelligence or God is omnipotent and omnipresent.
• Spirit is the ultimate reality.
• True human self-hood is divine.
• Divinely attuned thought is a positive force for good.
• All disease is mental in origin.
• Right thinking has a healing effect.

Evolution of thought

Adherents also generally believe that as humankind gains greater understanding of the world, New Thought itself will evolve to assimilate new knowledge. Alan Anderson and Deb Whitehouse have described New Thought as a "process" in which each individual and even the New Thought Movement itself is "new every moment". Thomas McFaul has claimed "continuous revelation", with new insights being received by individuals continuously over time. Jean Houston has spoken of the "possible human", or what we are capable of becoming.

Theological inclusionism

The Home of Truth has, from its inception as the Pacific Coast Metaphysical Bureau in the 1880s, under the leadership of Annie Rix Militz, disseminated the teachings of the Hindu teacher Swami Vivekananda. It is one of the more outspokenly interfaith of New Thought organizations, stating adherence to "the principle that Truth is Truth where ever it is found and who ever is sharing it".^{[failed verification]} Joel S. Goldsmith's The Infinite Way incorporates teaching from Christian Science, as well.

Therapeutic ideas

Divine Science, Unity Church, and Religious Science are organizations that developed from the New Thought movement. Each teaches that Infinite Intelligence, or God, is the sole reality. New Thought adherents believe that sickness is the result of the failure to realize this truth. In this line of thinking, healing is accomplished by the affirmation of oneness with the Infinite Intelligence or God.

John Bovee Dods (1795–1862), an early practitioner of New Thought, wrote several books on the idea that disease originates in the electrical impulses of the nervous system and is therefore curable by a change of belief. Later New Thought teachers, such as the early-20th-century author, editor, and publisher William Walker Atkinson, accepted this premise. He connected his idea of mental states of being with his understanding of the new scientific discoveries in electromagnetism and neural processes.

Criticism

While the beliefs that are held by practitioners of the New Thought movement are similar to many mainstream religious doctrines, there have been concerns raised among scholars and scientists about some of the views surrounding health and wellness that are perpetuated by the New Thought movement. Most pressing is the New Thought movement’s rejection of empirically supported scientific theories of the causes of diseases. In scientific medicine, diseases can have a wide range of physical causes, from abnormalities in genes and in cell growth that cause cancer, to viruses, bacteria, and fungi that cause infections, to environmental toxins that can damage entire organ systems, human physical diseases are caused by physical issues. While it has been empirically supported that the psychological and social health of a person can influence their susceptibility to disease (e.g., stress can suppress immune function, which increases risk of infection), mental states are not the cause of human disease, as is claimed by the New Thought movement.

Equally concerning is the New Thought movement’s emphasis on using faith and mental states as treatments for all human disease. While it has been supported that the use of relaxation therapy and other forms of alternative health practices are beneficial in improving the overall well-being of patients suffering from a wide variety of mental and physical health conditions (e.g., cancer, post-traumatic stress disorder), these practices are not effective in treating human disease alone, and should be undertaken in conjunction with modern medical therapies that have empirical support. This rejection of scientifically supported theories of disease and disease treatment is worsened by the New Thought movement’s assertion that mental states, attitudes, and faith in New Thought are the sole determinants of health.

The New Thought movement has received criticism akin to that levied against the holistic health movement that in claiming that sickness is caused by a person’s attitudes, mental states, and faith, it is easy to place blame on patients for not adopting a correct attitude, thought processes, and/or lifestyle. Blame can have powerful psychological effects – with stress and isolation seen in victim blaming being the largest issues that arise and the most concerning in terms of effect on patients’ health. Further, holding beliefs that health and disease is controlled by faith in a higher power can create an external locus of control (i.e., believers may feel as though they themselves cannot prevent disease, and that any illness or disorder that they encounter is an act of the higher power’s will). This external locus of control can create learned helplessness in believers that has been shown to exacerbate mental and physical health conditions via several mechanisms – including reduced incidence of help-seeking behaviour. 

Overall, the New Thought movement's position on the etiology and treatment of disease is not empirically supported.

Movement

New Thought publishing and educational activities reach approximately 2.5 million people annually. The largest New Thought-oriented denomination is the Japanese Seicho-no-Ie. Other belief systems within the New Thought movement include Jewish Science, Religious Science, Centers for Spiritual Living and Unity. Past denominations have included Psychiana and Father Divine.

Religious Science operates under three main organizations: the Centers for Spiritual Living; the Affiliated New Thought Network; and Global Religious Science Ministries. Ernest Holmes, the founder of Religious Science, stated that Religious Science is not based on any "authority" of established beliefs, but rather on "what it can accomplish" for the people who practice it. The Science of Mind, authored by Ernest Holmes, while based on a philosophy of being "open at the top", focuses extensively on the teachings of Jesus Christ. The American Christian Church International and its theological school, the Arnulf Seminary of Theology, are also deeply influenced by the ideology of the New Thought movement.

Unity, founded by Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, identifies itself as "Christian New Thought", focused on "Christian idealism", with the Bible as one of its main texts, although not interpreted literally. The other core text is Lessons in Truth by H. Emilie Cady. The Universal Foundation for Better Living, or UFBL, was founded in 1974 by Johnnie Colemon in Chicago, Illinois after breaking away from the Unity Church for "blatant racism".

Universal mind

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_mind 

Universal mind or universal consciousness is a metaphysical concept suggesting an underlying essence of all being and becoming in the universe. It includes the being and becoming that occurred in the universe prior to the arising of the concept of "Mind", a term that more appropriately refers to the organic, human, aspect of universal consciousness. It addresses inorganic being and becoming and the interactions that occur in that process without specific reference to the physical and chemical laws that try to describe those interactions. Those interactions have occurred, do occur, and continue to occur. Universal consciousness is the source, ground, basis, that underlies those interactions and the awareness and knowledge they imply.

Introduction

The concept of universal mind was presented by Anaxagoras, a Pre-Socratic philosopher who arrived in Athens some time after 480 BC. He taught that the growth of living things depends on the power of mind within the organisms that enables them to extract nourishment from surrounding substances. For this concept of mind, Anaxagoras was commended by Aristotle. Both Plato and Aristotle, however, objected that his notion of mind did not include a view that mind acts ethically, i.e. acts for the “best interests” of the universe.

The most original aspect of Anaxagoras's system was his doctrine of nous ("mind" or "reason").  A different Greek word, gnó̱si̱ (awareness), better reflects what is observed in the wider world of organic and inorganic being than just the human world. A worm, an amoeba, a bacteria, a raindrop, appears to act with "awareness" (gnó̱si̱) rather than "reason" (nous). Also, these actions would not commonly be referred to as being "reasonable" or "ethical".

In "The Huang Po Doctrine of Universal Mind", originated in around 857 CE, the idea of mind was disconnected from soul in this Buddhist school of thought.

Chu Ch’an says, “Universal mind, therefore, is something to which nothing can be attributed. Being absolute, it is beyond attributes. If for example, it were to be described as infinite, that would exclude from it whatever is finite, but the whole argument of the book is that universal mind is the only reality and that everything we apprehend through our senses, is nothing else but this mind. Even to think of it in terms of existence or non-existence is to misapprehend it entirely.” pp. 8–9 [3]

The term surfaced again in later philosophy, as in the writings of Hegel. - Hegel writes:

¤ 377 The knowledge of Mind is the highest and hardest, just because it is the most 'concrete' of sciences. The significance of that 'absolute' commandment, Know thyself − whether we look at it in itself or under the historical circumstances of its first utterance − is not to promote mere self−knowledge in respect of the particular capacities, character, propensities, and foibles of the single self. The knowledge it commands means that of man's genuine reality − of what is essentially and ultimately true and real − of mind as the true and essential being.” [4]

Descriptions

There are no definitions of the Universal Mind, but two authors within the New Thought movement offer vague descriptions in superlatives such as omnipotence and infinitude.

Ernest Holmes, the founder of the Science of Mind movement:

The Universal Mind contains all knowledge. It is the potential ultimate of all things. To It all things are possible.

New Thought author Charles Haanel said of the universal mind and its relationship to humans:

The Universal Mind, being infinite and omnipotent, has unlimited resources at its command, and when we remember that it is also omnipresent, we cannot escape the conclusion that we must be an expression or manifestation of that Mind. A recognition and understanding of the resources of the subconscious mind will indicate that the only difference between the subconscious and the Universal is one of degree. They differ only as a drop of water differs from the ocean. They are the same in kind and quality, the difference is one of degree only.

The nature of the universal mind is said to be omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent.

 

Psychological interpretation

Universal mind may be viewed from a scientific perspective as non-local consciousness. Michael Persinger wrote on non-local consciousness:

[a]s a human being, I am concerned about the illusionary explanations for human consciousness and the future of human existence. Consequently after writing the Neuropsychological Base of God Beliefs (1987), I began the systematic application of complex electromagnetic fields to discern the patterns that will induce experiences (sensed presence) that are attributed to the myriad of ego-alien intrusions which range from gods to aliens. The research is not to demean anyone's religious/mystical experience but instead to determine which portions of the brain or its electromagnetic patterns generate the experience

— Michael Persinger, in Huping Hu & Maoxin Wu

The atemporal nature of consciousness is explored by Mansoor Malik and Maria Hipolito. They summarise key theorists on the subject from different ontological perspectives:

Freud emphasized the timelessness of unconscious processes. He showed how unconscious ignores time and temporal progression. For example, in dreams and fantasy where past, present, and future are united in one representation, he showed that certain aspects of psychopathology are also essentially atemporal.

Hameroff (1996) conceptualizes consciousness as successive quantum superposition of the tubulin protein conformations in the brain. He proposes that with each conscious moment, “a new organization of Planck scale geometry is selected irreversibly”. This leads to apparent illusion of time. Thus without consciousness, there would be no time.

A research team in Australia conducted more than 20,000 experiments of universal mind and concluded: "Overwhelming evidence is pointing to the existence of 'supernatural' reality and a universal subconscious mind ( aka 'God' ): Many religious concepts are essentially a science of mind."

Twin study

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_study

Twin studies are studies conducted on identical or fraternal twins. They aim to reveal the importance of environmental and genetic influences for traits, phenotypes, and disorders. Twin research is considered a key tool in behavioral genetics and in content fields, from biology to psychology. Twin studies are part of the broader methodology used in behavior genetics, which uses all data that are genetically informative – siblings studies, adoption studies, pedigree, etc. These studies have been used to track traits ranging from personal behavior to the presentation of severe mental illnesses such as schizophrenia.

Twins are a valuable source for observation because they allow the study of environmental influence and varying genetic makeup: "identical" or monozygotic (MZ) twins share essentially 100% of their genes, which means that most differences between the twins (such as height, susceptibility to boredom, intelligence, depression, etc.) are due to experiences that one twin has but not the other twin. "Fraternal" or dizygotic (DZ) twins share only about 50% of their genes, the same as any other sibling. Twins also share many aspects of their environment (e.g., uterine environment, parenting style, education, wealth, culture, community) because they are born into the same family. The presence of a given genetic or phenotypic trait in only one member of a pair of twins (called discordance) provides a powerful window into environmental effects on such a trait.

Twins are also useful in showing the importance of the unique environment (specific to one twin or the other) when studying trait presentation. Changes in the unique environment can stem from an event or occurrence that has only affected one twin. This could range from a head injury or a birth defect that one twin has sustained while the other remains healthy.

The classical twin design compares the similarity of monozygotic (identical) and dizygotic (fraternal) twins. If identical twins are considerably more similar than fraternal twins (which is found for most traits), this implicates that genes play an important role in these traits. By comparing many hundreds of families with twins, researchers can then understand more about the roles of genetic effects, shared environment, and unique environment in shaping behavior.

Modern twin studies have concluded that almost all traits are in part influenced by genetic differences, with some characteristics showing a stronger influence (e.g. height), others an intermediate level (e.g. personality traits) and some more complex heritabilities, with evidence for different genes affecting different aspects of the trait – as in the case of autism. The methodological assumptions on which twin studies are based, however, have been criticized as untenable.

History

Francis Galton laid the foundations of behavior genetics as a branch of science.

Twins have been of interest to scholars since early civilization, including the early physician Hippocrates (5th century BCE), who attributed different diseases in twins to different material circumstances, and the stoic philosopher Posidonius (1st century BCE), who attributed such similarities to shared astrological circumstances. More recent study is from Sir Francis Galton's pioneering use of twins to study the role of genes and environment on human development and behavior. Galton, however, was unaware of the difference between identical and DZ twins.

This factor was still not understood when the first study using psychological tests was conducted by Edward Thorndike (1905) using fifty pairs of twins. This paper was an early statement of the hypothesis that family effects decline with age. His study compared twin pairs age 9–10 and 13–14 to normal siblings born within a few years of one another.

Thorndike incorrectly reasoned that his data supported for there being one, not two, twin types. This mistake was repeated by Ronald Fisher (1919), who argued

The preponderance of twins of like sex, does indeed become a new problem, because it has been formerly believed to be due to the proportion of identical twins. So far as I am aware, however, no attempt has been made to show that twins are sufficiently alike to be regarded as identical really exist in sufficient numbers to explain the proportion of twins of like sex.

An early, and perhaps first, study understanding the distinction is from the German geneticist Hermann Werner Siemens in 1924. Chief among Siemens' innovations was the polysymptomatic similarity diagnosis. This allowed him to account for the oversight that had stumped Fisher, and was a staple in twin research prior to the advent of molecular markers.

Wilhelm Weinberg and colleagues in 1910 used the identical-DZ distinction to calculate respective rates from the ratios of same- and opposite-sex twins in a maternity population. They partitioned co-variation amongst relatives into genetic and environmental elements, anticipating the later work of Fisher and Wright, including the effect of dominance on similarity of relatives, and beginning the first classic-twin studies.

A study conducted by Darrick Antell and Eva Taczanowski found that "twins showing the greatest discrepancies in visible aging signs also had the greatest degree of discordance between personal lifestyle choices and habits", and concluded that "the genetic influences on aging may be highly overrated, with lifestyle choices exerting far more important effects on physical aging."

Examples

Examples of prominent twin studies include the following:

• Maudsley Bipolar Twin Study
• Minnesota Twin Family Study
• Twins Early Development Study

Methods

The power of twin designs arises from the fact that twins may be either monozygotic (identical (MZ): developing from a single fertilized egg and therefore sharing all of their alleles) – or dizygotic (DZ: developing from two fertilized eggs and therefore sharing on average 50% of their polymorphic alleles, the same level of genetic similarity as found in non-twin siblings). These known differences in genetic similarity, together with a testable assumption of equal environments for identical and fraternal twins creates the basis for the twin design for exploring the effects of genetic and environmental variance on a phenotype.

The basic logic of the twin study can be understood with very little mathematics beyond an understanding of the concepts of variance and thence derived correlation.

Classical twin method

Like all behavior genetic research, the classical twin study begins from assessing the variance of a behavior (called a phenotype by geneticists) in a large group, and attempts to estimate how much of this is due to:

• genetic effects (heritability);
• shared environment – events that happen to both twins, affecting them in the same way;
• unshared, or unique, or nonshared environment – events that occur to one twin but not the other, or events that affect either twin in a different way.

Typically these three components are called A (additive genetics) C (common environment) and E (unique environment); hence the acronym ACE. It is also possible to examine non-additive genetics effects (often denoted D for dominance (ADE model); see below for more complex twin designs).

The ACE model indicates what proportion of variance in a trait is heritable, versus the proportion due to shared environment or un-shared environment. Research is carried out using SEM programs such as OpenMx, however the core logic of the twin design is the same, as described below:

Monozygotic (identical – MZ) twins raised in a family share both 100% of their genes, and all of the shared environment. Any differences arising between them in these circumstances are random (unique). The correlation between identical twins provides an estimate of A + C. Dizygotic (DZ) twins also share C, but share on average 50% of their genes: so the correlation between fraternal twins is a direct estimate of ½A+C. If r is correlation, then r_mz and r_dz are simply the correlations of the trait in identical and fraternal twins respectively. For any particular trait, then:

r_mz = A + C

r_dz = ½A + C

A, therefore, is twice the difference between identical and fraternal twin correlations : the additive genetic effect (Falconer's formula). C is simply the MZ correlation minus this estimate of A. The random (unique) factor E is 1 − r_mz: i.e., MZ twins differ due to unique environments only. (Jinks & Fulker, 1970; Plomin, DeFries, McClearn, & McGuffin, 2001).

Stated again, the difference between these two sums, then, allows us to solve for A, C, and E. As the difference between the identical and fraternal correlations is due entirely to a halving of the genetic similarity, the additive genetic effect 'A' is simply twice the difference between the identical and fraternal correlations:

A = 2 (r_mz − r_dz)

As the identical correlation reflects the full effect of A and C, E can be estimated by subtracting this correlation from 1

E = 1 − r_mz

Finally, C can be derived:

C = r_mz − A

Modern modeling

Beginning in the 1970s, research transitioned to modeling genetic, environmental effects using maximum likelihood methods (Martin & Eaves, 1977). While computationally much more complex, this approach has numerous benefits rendering it almost universal in current research.

An example structural model (for the heritability of height among Danish males) is shown:

A: ACE model showing raw (non-standardised) variance coefficients

B: ACE model showing standardised variance coefficients

Model A on the left shows the raw variance in height. This is useful as it preserves the absolute effects of genes and environments, and expresses these in natural units, such as mm of height change. Sometimes it is helpful to standardize the parameters, so each is expressed as percentage of total variance. Because we have decomposed variance into A, C, and E, the total variance is simply A + C + E. We can then scale each of the single parameters as a proportion of this total, i.e., Standardised–A = A/(A + C + E). Heritability is the standardised genetic effect.

Model comparison

A principal benefit of modeling is the ability to explicitly compare models: Rather than simply returning a value for each component, the modeler can compute confidence intervals on parameters, but, crucially, can drop and add paths and test the effect via statistics such as the AIC. Thus, for instance to test for predicted effects of family or shared environment on behavior, an AE model can be objectively compared to a full ACE model. For example, we can ask of the figure above for height: Can C (shared environment) be dropped without significant loss of fit? Alternatively, confidence intervals can be calculated for each path.

Multi-group and multivariate modeling

Multivariate modeling can give answers to questions about the genetic relationship between variables that appear independent. For instance: do IQ and long-term memory share genes? Do they share environmental causes? Additional benefits include the ability to deal with interval, threshold, and continuous data, retaining full information from data with missing values, integrating the latent modeling with measured variables, be they measured environments, or, now, measured molecular genetic markers such as SNPs. In addition, models avoid constraint problems in the crude correlation method: all parameters will lie, as they should, between 0–1 (standardized).

Multivariate, and multiple-time wave studies, with measured environment and repeated measures of potentially causal behaviours are now the norm. Examples of these models include extended twin designs, simplex models, and growth-curve models.

SEM programs such as OpenMx and other applications suited to constraints and multiple groups have made the new techniques accessible to reasonably skilled users.

Modeling the environment: MZ discordant designs

As MZ twins share both their genes and their family-level environmental factors, any differences between MZ twins reflect E: the unique environment. Researchers can use this information to understand the environment in powerful ways, allowing epidemiological tests of causality that are otherwise typically confounded by factors such as gene-environment covariance, reverse causation and confounding.

An example of a positive MZ discordant effect is shown below on the left. The twin who scores higher on trait 1 also scores higher on trait 2. This is compatible with a "dose" of trait 1 causing an increase in trait 2. Of course, trait 2 might also be affecting trait 1. Disentangling these two possibilities requires a different design (see below for an example). A null result is incompatible with a causal hypothesis.

A depiction of MZ-discordance data

MZ discordant test of hypothesis that exercise protects against depression

Take for instance the case of an observed link between depression and exercise (See Figure above on right). People who are depressed also reporting doing little physical activity. One might hypothesise that this is a causal link: that "dosing" patients with exercise would raise their mood and protect against depression. The next figure shows what empirical tests of this hypothesis have found: a null result.

Longitudinal discordance designs

A cross-lagged longitudinal MZ discordant twin design. This model can take account of relationships among differences across traits at time one, and then examine the distinct hypotheses that increments in trait1 drive subsequent change in that trait in the future, or, importantly, in other traits.

As may be seen in the next Figure, this design can be extended to multiple measurements, with consequent increase in the kinds of information that one can learn. This is called a cross-lagged model (multiple traits measured over more than one time).

In the longitudinal discordance model, differences between identical twins can be used to take account of relationships among differences across traits at time one (path A), and then examine the distinct hypotheses that increments in trait1 drive subsequent change in that trait in the future (paths B and E), or, importantly, in other traits (paths C & D). In the example, the hypothesis that the observed correlation where depressed persons often also exercise less than average is causal, can be tested. If exercise is protective against depression, then path D should be significant, with a twin who exercises more showing less depression as a consequence.

Assumptions

It can be seen from the modeling above, the main assumption of the twin study is that of equal environments, also known as the equal environments assumption. This assumption has been directly tested. A special case occurs where parents believe their twins to be non-identical when in fact they are genetically identical. Studies of a range of psychological traits indicate that these children remain as concordant as MZ twins raised by parents who treated them as identical.

Molecular genetic methods of heritability estimation have tended to produce lower estimates than classical twin studies, providing evidence that the equal environments assumption of the classic twin design may not be sound. A 2016 study determined that the assumption that the prenatal environment of twins was equal was largely tenable. Researchers continue to debate whether or not the equal environment assumption is valid.

Measured similarity: A direct test of assumptions in twin designs

A particularly powerful technique for testing the twin method was reported by Visscher et al. Instead of using twins, this group took advantage of the fact that while siblings on average share 50% of their genes, the actual gene-sharing for individual sibling pairs varies around this value, essentially creating a continuum of genetic similarity or "twinness" within families. Estimates of heritability based on direct estimates of gene sharing confirm those from the twin method, providing support for the assumptions of the method.

Sex differences

Genetic factors may differ between the sexes, both in gene expression and in the range of gene × environment interactions. Fraternal opposite sex twin pairs are invaluable in explicating these effects.

In an extreme case, a gene may only be expressed in one sex (qualitative sex limitation). More commonly, the effects of gene-alleles may depend on the sex of the individual. A gene might cause a change of 100 g in weight in males, but perhaps 150 g in females – a quantitative gene effect. Such effects are Environments may impact on the ability of genes to express themselves and may do this via sex differences. For instance genes affecting voting behavior would have no effect in females if females are excluded from the vote. More generally, the logic of sex-difference testing can extend to any defined sub-group of individuals. In cases such as these, the correlation for same and opposite sex DZ twins will differ, betraying the effect of the sex difference.

For this reason, it is normal to distinguish three types of fraternal twins. A standard analytic workflow would involve testing for sex-limitation by fitting models to five groups, identical male, identical female, fraternal male, fraternal female, and fraternal opposite sex. Twin modeling thus goes beyond correlation to test causal models involving potential causal variables, such as sex.

Gene × environment interactions

Gene effects may often be dependent on the environment. Such interactions are known as G×E interactions, in which the effects of a gene allele differ across different environments. Simple examples would include situations where a gene multiplies the effect of an environment: perhaps adding 1 inch to height in high nutrient environments, but only half an inch to height in low-nutrient environments. This is seen in different slopes of response to an environment for different genotypes.

Often researchers are interested in changes in heritability under different conditions: In environments where alleles can drive large phenotypic effects (as above), the relative role of genes will increase, corresponding to higher heritability in these environments.

A second effect is G × E correlation, in which certain alleles tend to accompany certain environments. If a gene causes a parent to enjoy reading, then children inheriting this allele are likely to be raised in households with books due to GE correlation: one or both of their parents has the allele and therefore will accumulate a book collection and pass on the book-reading allele. Such effects can be tested by measuring the purported environmental correlate (in this case books in the home) directly.

Often the role of environment seems maximal very early in life, and decreases rapidly after compulsory education begins. This is observed for instance in reading as well as intelligence. This is an example of a G*Age effect and allows an examination of both GE correlations due to parental environments (these are broken up with time), and of G*E correlations caused by individuals actively seeking certain environments.

Norms of reaction

Studies in plants or in animal breeding allow the effects of experimentally randomized genotypes and environment combinations to be measured. By contrast, human studies are typically observational. This may suggest that norms of reaction cannot be evaluated.

As in other fields such as economics and epidemiology, several designs have been developed to capitalise on the ability to use differential gene-sharing, repeated exposures, and measured exposure to environments (such as children social status, chaos in the family, availability and quality of education, nutrition, toxins etc.) to combat this confounding of causes. An inherent appeal of the classic twin design is that it begins to untangle these confounds. For example, in identical and fraternal twins shared environment and genetic effects are not confounded, as they are in non-twin familial studies. Twin studies are thus in part motivated by an attempt to take advantage of the random assortment of genes between members of a family to help understand these correlations.

While the twin study tells us only how genes and families affect behavior within the observed range of environments, and with the caveat that often genes and environments will covary, this is a considerable advance over the alternative, which is no knowledge of the different roles of genes and environment whatsoever. Twin studies are therefore often used as a method of controlling at least one part of this observed variance: Partitioning, for instance, what might previously have been assumed to be family environment into shared environment and additive genetics using the experiment of fully and partly shared genomes in twins.

No single design can address all issues. Additional information is available outside the classic twin design. Adoption designs are a form of natural experiment that tests norms of reaction by placing the same genotype in different environments. Association studies, e.g., allow direct study of allelic effects. Mendelian randomization of alleles also provides opportunities to study the effects of alleles at random with respect to their associated environments and other genes.

Extended twin designs and more complex genetic models

The basic or classical twin-design contains only identical and fraternal twins raised in their biological family. This represents only a sub-set of the possible genetic and environmental relationships. It is fair to say, therefore, that the heritability estimates from twin designs represent a first step in understanding the genetics of behavior.

The variance partitioning of the twin study into additive genetic, shared, and unshared environment is a first approximation to a complete analysis taking into account gene-environment covariance and interaction, as well as other non-additive effects on behavior. The revolution in molecular genetics has provided more effective tools for describing the genome, and many researchers are pursuing molecular genetics in order to directly assess the influence of alleles and environments on traits.

An initial limitation of the twin design is that it does not afford an opportunity to consider both Shared Environment and Non-additive genetic effects simultaneously. This limit can be addressed by including additional siblings to the design.

A second limitation is that gene-environment correlation is not detectable as a distinct effect. Addressing this limit requires incorporating adoption models, or children-of-twins designs, to assess family influences uncorrelated with shared genetic effects.

Continuous variables and ordinal variables

While concordance studies compare traits either present or absent in each twin, correlational studies compare the agreement in continuously varying traits across twins.

Criticism

The twin method has been subject to criticism from statistical genetics, statistics, and psychology, with some researchers, such as Burt & Simons (2014), arguing that conclusions reached via this method are ambiguous or meaningless. Core elements of these criticisms and their rejoinders are listed below.

Criticisms of fundamental assumptions

Critics of twin studies argue that they are based on false or questionable assumptions, including that monozygotic twins share 100% of their genes and the equal environments assumption. On this basis, critics contend that twin studies tend to generate inflated estimates of heritability due to biological confounding factors and consistent underestimation of environmental variance. Other critics take a more moderate stance, arguing that the equal environments assumption is typically inaccurate, but that this inaccuracy tends to have only a modest effect on heritability estimates.

Criticisms of statistical methods

It has been argued that the statistical underpinnings of twin research are invalid. Such statistical critiques argue that heritability estimates used for most twin studies rest on restrictive assumptions that are usually not tested, and if they are, they are often contradicted by the data.

For example, Peter Schonemann has criticized methods for estimating heritability developed in the 1970s. He has also argued that the heritability estimate from a twin study may reflect factors other than shared genes. Using the statistical models published in Loehlin and Nichols (1976), the narrow HR-heritability of responses to the question “did you have your back rubbed” has been shown to work out to .92 heritable for males and .21 heritable for females, and the question “Did you wear sunglasses after dark?” is 130% heritable for males and 103% for females. Critics also contend that the concept of "heritability" estimated in twin studies is merely a statistical abstraction with no relationship to an underlying entity in DNA.

Responses to statistical critiques

Before computers, statisticians used methods that were computationally tractable, at the cost of known limitations. Since the 1980s these approximate statistical methods have been discarded: Modern twin methods based on structural equation modeling are not subject to the limitations and heritability estimates such as those noted above are mathematically impossible. Critically, the newer methods allow for explicit testing of the role of different pathways and incorporation and testing of complex effects.

Sampling: Twins as representative members of the population

Results of twin studies cannot be automatically generalized beyond the population they come from. It is therefore important to understand the particular sample studied, and the nature of twins themselves. Twins are not a random sample of the population, and they differ in their developmental environment. In this sense they are not representative.

For example: Dizygotic (DZ) twin births are affected by many factors. Some women frequently produce more than one egg at each menstrual period and, therefore, are more likely to have twins. This tendency may run in the family either in the mother's or father's side of the family, and often runs through both. Women over the age of 35 are more likely to produce two eggs. Women who have three or more children are also likely to have dizygotic twins. Artificial induction of ovulation and in vitro fertilization-embryo replacement can also give rise to fraternal and identical twins.

Response to representativeness of twins

Twins differ very little from non-twin siblings. Measured studies on the personality and intelligence of twins suggest that they have scores on these traits very similar to those of non-twins (for instance Deary et al. 2006).

Separated twin pairs as representative of other twins

Separated twin pairs, identical or fraternal, are generally separated by adoption. This makes their families of origin non-representative of typical twin families in that they give up their children for adoption. The families they are adopted to are also non-representative of typical twin families in that they are all approved for adoption by children's protection authorities and that a disproportionally large fraction of them have no biological children. Those who volunteer to studies are not even representative of separated twins in general since not all separated twins agree to be part of twin studies.

Detection problems

There can be some issues of undetected behaviors in the case of behaviors that many people keep secret presently or in their earlier lives. They may not be as willing to reveal behaviors that are discriminated against or stigmatized. If environment played no role in the actual behavior, skewed detection would still make it look like it played a role. For environment to appear to have no role in such cases, there would have to be either a counterproductivity of intolerance in the sense of intolerance causing the behavior it is bigoted against, or a flaw in the study that makes the results scientifically useless. Even if environment does play a role, the numbers would still be skewed.

Terminology

Pairwise concordance

For a group of twins, pairwise concordance is defined as C/(C+D), where C is the number of concordant pairs and D is the number of discordant pairs.

For example, a group of 10 twins have been pre-selected to have one affected member (of the pair). During the course of the study four other previously non-affected members become affected, giving a pairwise concordance of 4/(4+6) or 4/10 or 40%.

Probandwise concordance

For a group of twins in which at least one member of each pair is affected, probandwise concordance is a measure of the proportion of twins who have the illness who have an affected twin and can be calculated with the formula of 2C/(2C+D), in which C is the number of concordant pairs and D is the number of discordant pairs.

For example, consider a group of 10 twins that have been pre-selected to have one affected member. During the course of the study, four other previously non-affected members become affected, giving a probandwise concordance of 8/(8+6) or 8/14 or 57%.