Who’s Afraid of Philosophical Wonder Juice? In Defense of Pseudoscience
The mention of the “C-word” provokes a reaction both absurdly disproportionate and delightfully predictable. Consciousness is one of those things you bring up if you want to watch reasonably mannered people lose their minds. Explanations of consciousness, or the attempt at such explanations, turn any ordinarily restrained academic into something volatile, irrational — a raging lunatic commonly found on social media and beyond. It’s hard to say whether it is the subject itself that inflames people so much, or whether their courteous restraint was always a performance act, one so easily discarded. But whatever position you take on the matter — whether you believe consciousness is some ineffable, singular phenomenon, or merely a puzzle for science to eventually solve — the public debate rarely seems to be about consciousness at all.
The fight about the nature of consciousness is about legitimacy — social legitimacy — and who gets to participate in shaping our shared world. No, that’s not quite it. Even this formulation misses the deeper structural anxiety coming to the fore here: the alignment between claims of legitimacy and the construction of the public selves we wish to project, the desires we have for how we’re seen, how we belong. What is at stake is not consciousness, but how the discourse around it serves as a mechanism for shaping social authority, and ultimately, desire. The conversation, merely ostensibly about consciousness, becomes a vehicle for negotiating visibility, power, and identity within the social order.
In a recent letter, signed by a staggering number of academics — ranging from the illustrious “I’ve written a book or ten” type to the less illustrious “I’ve always wanted to sign something that makes me look like I’ve belonged in illustrious company” type — a certain theory of consciousness was declared to be pseudoscience. Among the accusations lobbed at this theory, two stood out: first, this theory, “Integrated Information Theory”, doesn’t deserve the relentless public attention it gets, and second, it’s blissfully avoidant of the last few decades of neuroscience, preferring instead to cuddle up with its favorite philosophical wonder juice (“Panpsychism”). This, naturally, set off the annual Twitter wars. I’ve joined in these skirmishes myself, once upon a time, with all the fervor and self-righteousness that one can muster while staring at a screen and waiting for the water to boil. But then I got old. So did the debate. Frankly, both accusations hit the nail on the head. The philosophical packaging these consciousness theorists push is, in my humble opinion, absolute bullshit. (Note that I didn’t say the underlying idea itself must be utter bullshit — just the way it’s being idly wrapped up, proposed as ‘radical,’ and passed off as new by certain people who shall remain unnamed but would probably be feeling my eyes on them while reading.) As for the fancy mathematical modeling sometimes attached to this philosophical extravaganza, well, under the right conditions, even that might qualify for pseudoscience extraordinaire. But, honestly, I’m not losing sleep over whether or not we should call this thing pseudoscience. What boggles my mind is why on Earth we can’t at least entertain the idea that sometimes, maybe what we call pseudoscience warrants to be entertained in all seriousness simply because of its current status as pseudoscience.
Consider Cantor, the mathematician. Now, Cantor had the rather bold notion that there are different sizes of infinity. This, as you can imagine, didn’t go down too well with contemporary mathematicians, who all but wrote him off as a lunatic. Which, to be fair, he eventually was — he did end up in a sanatorium, after all. Yet, while Cantor was undoubtedly mad, so was the idea of different sizes of infinity. Infinity is quite big enough as it is without introducing sizes, like it’s something you can buy in small, medium, or large. But the idea turned out to be insanely important for modern mathematics and physics. Ever since Hilbert’s hotel, it’s clear that Cantor’s madness was just what the universe ordered.
Or consider phlogiston — that funky principle of flammability, which, according to some very serious people with powdered wigs, was lurking inside all combustible things. Phlogiston doesn’t exist, sure, but neither does the idea of oxygen that Lavoisier introduced. Our modern element of oxygen is nothing like the two elements he called oxygen. Oops. So, basically, we replaced one non-existent thing with another almost-as-wrong thing, but then kept the name and pinned it on the stuff that we now call oxygen. Meanwhile, in the wake of not being correct in our grand theorizing about nature, we also invented batteries and hydrogen fuel technologies.
The history of science is full of weird twists and turns. That doesn’t make modern science any less scientific, nor does it magically elevate pseudoscience into something respectable. This discussion misses a much more interesting point, really. What makes all the theorizing interesting in scientific inquiry is not whether what it describes actually exists. I mean, really really exists. What makes it interesting is that it makes us uncomfortable in our deceptive comfort of “knowing stuff”.
The value of pseudoscience lies in the almost visceral discomfort some batshit ideas provoke. Have you ever watched a pseudoscientist contort themselves into a mental fractal, trying desperately to make their theory fit any scrap of skepticism hurled their way? It’s a sight to behold. And before long, you realize this is not just a feature of pseudoscience — it’s a fundamental human behavior.
We believe a lot of shit. And occasionally we believe it with conviction that goes against the odds of our time. Sometimes, that shit turns out as fertilizer. And sometimes that shit just stinks. The former we call science, the latter pseudoscience. The thing is that the former can never come into being without a slight whiff of the latter. The progression of science is rarely logical; it moves forward, unavoidably, with a taint of its often fragrant origins.
So, really, who are we to deodorize scientific progress? Bring on the pseudoscience!
