Eric Schwitzgebel informs me that, annoyingly, the Overton Window turns out to be, like, something a libertarian dude published after he died. But, you know, there is actually a lot of plausibility to it. Eric is thinking about how, in philosophy, ideas migrate from unthinkable to sensible to popular. Maybe even policy! It would be fun to write a history of philosophical common sense. Try to trace shifts in what people have thought is obvious vs. weird. Eric is thinking, specifically, about local, recent shifts in attitudes towards panpsychism. Pretty wild idea, panpsychism! But if it moves from unthinkable to merely radical, probably notions like plant cognition and group cognition move from radical to … acceptable?
But here’s the thing. He’s burying the lede, my old poker buddy Eric is. (Or maybe he’s just playing his cards close to his chest.) If panpsychism is true, the universe could, like, BE an Overton Window. It started as unthinkable. Then there was that Big Bang moment when it passed from unthinkable to radical, and rapidly moves from there to acceptable, sensible. I would say that the existence of the universe is a very popular policy, in space and time, at present. It just makes sense, and the thought of nothing actually seems the radical option, by contrast.
Perhaps you would also like to subscribe to my metaphysics of cognitive bias newsletter: The World As Willed Misrepresentation.
{ 41 comments }
Z 01.31.18 at 10:45 am
Then there was that Big Bang moment when it passed from unthinkable to radical, and rapidly moves from there to acceptable, sensible. I would say that the existence of the universe is a very popular policy, in space and time, at present. It just makes sense, and the thought of nothing actually seems the radical option, by contrast.
You think things existing is currently a sensible position, when it comes to policy arguments within the Universe? Can you be more oblivious to your radical pro-baryonic matter bias? Please remember that the overwhelming majority opinion is that we should be dark energy and that the official conclusion of the state of the Universe speech is that by next legislature, everything will have been teared apart through the by-now completely bipartisan consensus on accelerated expansion. That’s the popular choice!
Or maybe you were actually attempting a devious shift of the Overton Window yourself – you sly dog! – and you are actually a pro-Dark matter guy yourself through and through. So you like to pretend you’re a “matter matters”-extremist who subscribes to totally outlandish claims like “things matter in the Universe” or “a Universe with something in it is better than a Universe with nothing in it” in order to secure the status of “reasonable junior partner in the permanent minority” to your substance of choice.
c_haesemeyer 01.31.18 at 10:48 am
The unthinkable becoming common sense isn’t the same as the Overton window though. I’d say it’s more Raymond Williams’ theory of the dominant, residual and emergent than a window that one imagines moving over a set landscape of possible thought.
MisterMr 01.31.18 at 12:55 pm
If we speak about politics, I think that the “Overton window” is better conceived as the “normative center”.
For example in 1960 the “center” was that the government had to do an active industrial policy, lefties wanted a more active one and righties a less active one. But then in 1990 the “center” was that the government had to privatize everything, and the left wanted to privatize a bit less and a bit slower and the right a bit more and a bit faster.
Basically the left and the right define themselves against each other and against this normative center, that changes in time.
Regarding panpsichism, though, the fact that an idea becomes “acceptable” says nothing about wether that idea is true, panpsichism is BS regardless of what people believe about it, and the same goes for politics.
SusanC 01.31.18 at 1:06 pm
There’s a joke (attributed to Bertrand Russell) about the woman who said she was a solipsist and was surprised that there weren’t more of them.
Can you have an Overton window if strong anti-realism is true, and Eric and I are just dream characters in one of John Holbo’s dreams? Maybe you can. Maybe you’re just slowly convincing yourself that your sense impressions of phenomena correspond to something “real”, and the dream characters, being just projections of your unconscious thoughts, mostly go along with you. (Although, of course, some of them give voice to your unconscious doubt that this might not be the case). Then the Overton window is something like a dream visualization of the statistical distribution of your unconscious doubt.
casmilus 01.31.18 at 2:03 pm
There’s an old Richard Rorty essay that starts off by saying how Spinoza’s atheism was beyond the pale for centuries… and now isn’t. And then he goes on to say that pragmatism or relativism or whatever he was calling it, would have the same journey from reprehensible to respectable.
Philip Goff is a young philosopher getting a big of attention at being a panpsychist right now.
steven t johnson 01.31.18 at 3:14 pm
Overton Window=the view between the blinders
The key thing about the blinders is what they are meant to keep the wearer from seeing. A philosophical Overton Window is about excluding impolitic ideas. Panpsychism is not becoming acceptable, it’s just one of the metaphysics left as the blinders exclude more and more of reality. Philosophical materialism, scientific materialism, “naturalism” insofar as this weasel word hints at either are becoming increasingly less useful to the owners. The blinders are metaphorical. In practice, anticompetitive practices in the marketplace of ideas serve the same function. Not that the free market works any better to optimize human welfare in the realm of philosophy than it does in crass material production.
But the use of “Overton Window” here seems to be a stand-in for Haldane.
“The four stages of acceptance:
1. This is worthless nonsense.
2. This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view.
3. This is true, but quite unimportant.
4. I always said so.”
Z 01.31.18 at 3:50 pm
Oh sh***t, everybody else is posting thoughtful comments on the metaphysical interpretation of the Overton Window…
It would be fun to write a history of philosophical common sense.
Isn’t it more or less the project Marx initiated in The German Ideology “The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance […] For instance, in an age and in a country where royal power, aristocracy, and bourgeoisie are contending for mastery and where, therefore, mastery is shared, the doctrine of the separation of powers proves to be the dominant idea and is expressed as an “eternal law.†(Overton Window! And there’s even a nod towards panpsychism just a couple lines below!)” and all that jazz? You have the power, your ideas, and more precisely the ideas that reflect how you have the power, are philosophical common sense. Not that I’m claiming that Marx finishes the topic or even that he got most things right, just that he’s a good start, surely.
Pretty wild idea, panpsychism! But if it moves from unthinkable to merely radical, probably notions like plant cognition and group cognition move from radical to … acceptable?
Is that what is happening though? From my corner of the world, the precise scientific sense in which a plant or more accurately probably a plant’s cell can perform a cognitive act, in the same sense that a neuron or neuronal net can perform a cognitive act, is in the process of being built and the ensuing question (so, do they?) in the process of being settled (and as someone with rather favorable dispositions towards to so-called Gallistel-King conjecture, I would find a positive answer not too surprising). Group cognition, some people think they have said interesting things about (Dawkins, Dennett…). I disagree but YMMV. I agree that interesting things about it can be said in principle. So things are moving, but quite independently it seems to me of what people think about dark matter and dark energy having access to consciousness (if you think they don’t, but that matter does, you don’t believe in panpsychism, you believe in radical baryon supremacy). Insofar as something is moving something else, it surely goes in the converse direction (“Oh, weird, trees can compute, possibly an isolated cell can compute, well I guess the idea that a complex molecule can compute is not so far fetched after all and from that, well maybe anything can compute isn’t totally batshit crazy…”), doesn’t it?
Anarcissie 01.31.18 at 4:28 pm
I would think panpsychism would require that photons and electrons be in some way conscious or ‘mind’. No need to stop at neurons, trees, or even bacteria. Seems reasonable to me. However, my idea of the Overton Window is more about the boundaries of what it is permitted to think and say due to the exertion of power and persuasion by authorities, not merely fashion.
Eric 01.31.18 at 5:31 pm
I will allow for the possibility of dark matter and dark energy having access to consciousness as soon as someone can demonstrate to me how the very inclusion of dark matter and dark energy into the current standard model of cosmology does not constitute an announcement of the logical bankruptcy of said cosmological model.
Whirrlaway 01.31.18 at 6:13 pm
Still stuck in the Enlightenment after all these years. “Cogito ergo sum”, as someone remarked.
Heliopause 01.31.18 at 8:29 pm
@8
“my idea of the Overton Window is more about the boundaries of what it is permitted to think and say due to the exertion of power and persuasion by authorities”
More or less my take as well. If its genesis is in arguments over public policy then Overton Window wouldn’t much apply to philosophical concepts, or maybe I should say its meaning is being stretched too far. Philosophers are good at inventing terminology so maybe they should come up with a new one.
Robert 02.01.18 at 1:44 am
I have been annoyed for years with talk about “The Overton window”. Why not talk about Gramsci’s hegemonic ideas?
John Holbo 02.01.18 at 3:35 am
““my idea of the Overton Window is more about the boundaries of what it is permitted to think and say due to the exertion of power and persuasion by authoritiesâ€
More or less my take as well. If its genesis is in arguments over public policy then Overton Window wouldn’t much apply to philosophical concepts, or maybe I should say its meaning is being stretched too far.”
I disagree, insofar as my sense is that, in philosophy, the weight of ‘what’s normal to think’ is quite palpable, but insufficiently acknowledged. What are our intuitions about X? No one really denies this, but intuitions are authority figures of questionable authoritativeness. They reflect ‘what everyone around here seems to think’. Intellectual fashions. If that’s right, then Overton’s strategy – don’t sweat the small stuff, propose big paradigm-busting changes and thereby shift common sense a few tics! – is a workable stategy. But of course it’s also sophistical.
Heliopause 02.01.18 at 3:55 am
@13
I still think you need a new term. I propose the Holbo Viaduct.
Gabriel 02.01.18 at 7:20 am
Anarcissie:
That’s the position that Chalmers et al are taking; that consciousness (since attempts to reductively boil it down to grey matter have been largely unsuccessful) might be an intrinsic part of the fundamental universe, or at least present whenever information-rich systems organize themselves. They all tend to stress ‘might be’.
John Holbo 02.01.18 at 9:02 am
Best of all would be to write philosophy papers with all the rollout and fanfare of the Nunes Memo. If you could have the Nunes Memo, but about how the FBI suppressed evidence of panpsychism. Then you’re off to the races!
bad Jim 02.01.18 at 9:12 am
In the U.S. it’s taken for granted that taxes are bad, and tax cuts are always good. In 1978 California froze property taxes, which is wonderful for me and my elderly neighbors, and for business properties which are so structured as never to change ownership, not so nice for anyone so fortunate as to be able to afford buying a new house. I keep my tax bill handy just to outrage unwitting visitors.
This was not good for the state, and public services struggled with the shortfall for decades. As it happens, the state turned so Democratic that even the supermajority requirements for tax increases were obviated by the election results. Surely this generational injustice will shortly be redressed?
No, even returning the vehicle license fee to its former level is intensely resented; it has been done, but not that long ago Governor Gray Davis was tossed from office for attempting this modest measure. It was only a hundred dollars or so, money badly needed, yet somehow an intolerable affront. Jerry Brown has been able to get this re-enacted, but that’s about the limit of his power. The property tax is still baroque.
Z 02.01.18 at 10:13 am
Anarcissie I would think panpsychism would require that photons and electrons be in some way conscious or ‘mind’. No need to stop at neurons, trees, or even bacteria.
I would repeat the joke that you are displaying radical baryon/lepton supremacist views here…
Seems reasonable to me.
Reasonable, really? Inspiring, poetic, comforting… I could understand (I do quite like Poe’s metaphysical works “oh why do your wings droop as we hover above this fair star […] Its brilliant flowers look like a fairy dream—but its fierce volcanoes like the passions of a turbulent heart. AGATHOS. They are!—they are!”). Purely instrumentally, I don’t see the point, though. Everything is conscious. Everything is mind. OK. So what are the points of the words “conscious” and “mind” then?
Gabriel That’s the position that Chalmers et al are taking; that consciousness (since attempts to reductively boil it down to grey matter have been largely unsuccessful) might be an intrinsic part of the fundamental universe
On that note, anybody here familiar with the Free Will Theorem of Conway and Kochen? That’s a neat observation that (a minuscule and uncontroversial subset of) the axioms of Quantum mechanics and General Relativity imply that if human beings have free will in the sense that their future actions are not a function of the past, then so do already elementary particles.
John Holbo I disagree, insofar as my sense is that, in philosophy, the weight of ‘what’s normal to think’ is quite palpable, but insufficiently acknowledged.
99% of what is normal to think in philosophy is a direct function of the social structure of the field of philosophy, don’t you think? Whether you write for academic journals or in books (and then again, books which appear in a University press or in a general publishing house? and for which general audience?), your academic genealogy and likely future trajectory, your main source of revenue, the composition of hiring committees and editorial boards etc. At least, as a linguistic and scholarly outsider, I always marvel at what apparently passes as uncontroversial and/or well-known in the English-speaking world that would be considered completely outlandish and/or obscure in my national tradition (and vice-versa of course). My favorite test in that respect is to ask which contemporary X (X=philosopher, historian, linguist, anthropologist, sociologist, political analysis…) you have read that has never published anything in your maternal language. If the answer is zero, well…
Maybe you’re right that it isn’t sufficiently acknowledged (by philosophers I assume? the incentives to do so are probably low) but the diagnosis seems blindingly obvious.
casmilus 02.01.18 at 10:36 am
Rosi Braidotti described herself as a “vitalist” in “The Posthuman”. I got the impression from that book that she derived this view from Deleuze, and that it was widespread amongst his followers. Please correct me if that is a misapprehension about GD. Still, there are plenty of people in the “theory” world who seem to hold metaphysics that would be considered outre within academic philosophy.
John Holbo 02.01.18 at 11:39 am
“Maybe you’re right that it isn’t sufficiently acknowledged (by philosophers I assume? the incentives to do so are probably low) but the diagnosis seems blindingly obvious.”
I don’t think anyone fails to notice. But it’s like the weather. No one does anything about it.
nastywoman 02.01.18 at 1:01 pm
There is no understanding of the Overton window without traveling to Overton with a four wheel drive or a motorcycle.
In Overton you follow the Mormon Mesa Road to the top of the mesa eastward. As you come to the top of the mesa, you will pass a cattle guard. Continue east across the mesa for 2.7 miles. Do not leave the mesa. Just before you come to a second cattle guard at the east edge of the mesa, there will be a less-traveled road/path that extends along the rim of the mesa. Turn left onto this rim trail and follow it north 1.3 miles and then you see it.
The window consists of a long trench in the earth, 30 feet (9 m) wide, 50 feet (15 m) deep, and 1500 feet (457 m) long, created by the displacement of 244,000 tons of rock, mostly rhyolite and sandstone. Two trenches straddle either side of a natural canyon (into which the excavated material was dumped).
And the window essentially consists of what is not there, what has been displaced and is a work by Michael Heizer.
SusanC 02.01.18 at 1:33 pm
I feel that philosophers ought to be reflecting on the boundaries of the sayable within their own discipline, even if they’re not actually doing it. It kind of sounds like a philosophical question.
Z’s comment about the language barrier is interesting. You even see that in the sciences, at least in the short term. (Group X is doing interesting research on Y, but because they published in a language other than English, the English-speaking researchers on Y are totally unaware of it. An English translation of the important papers may show up eventually).
(Personally, my reading of things in languages other then English is a bit idiosyncratic. The Brit-bashing editorials in the Süddeutsche Zeitung can be entertaining…)
Z 02.01.18 at 3:37 pm
SusanC I feel that philosophers ought to be reflecting on the boundaries of the sayable within their own discipline, even if they’re not actually doing it.
Or “If I have resolved to ask some questions that I would rather have left to philosophy, it is because it seemed to me that philosophy, for all its questioning, did not ask them; and because, especially with reÂspect to the social sciences, it never ceased to raise questions that did not seem to me to be essential while avoiding asking itself about the reasons and above all the (often not very philosophical) causes of its questioning” as an old friend used to say.
John, that’s OT, but no comment love for your post on Other Minds (meaning the Leave a comment box doesn’t seem to appear)? The one time I have actually read a book mentioned on CT…
William Berry 02.01.18 at 3:48 pm
@John Holbo: Maybe it’s just my computer, or perhaps intentional on your part, but your (really fascinating) new post, “The Birth of Intermediacy?”, does not enable comments.
John Holbo 02.01.18 at 3:52 pm
Thanks for noting lack of comments for that other post. Weird. Fixed now.
Ogden Wernstrom 02.01.18 at 6:36 pm
bad Jim roots the reality I have created in the reality we all share.
Anarcissie 02.02.18 at 12:42 am
Z 02.01.18 at 10:13 am @ 18 —
If you postulate that mind is the most basic substance / substrate / ground of being of the world, it ‘solves’ problems like the origin and basis of consciousness — everything is already mind, or has at least a mental aspect. I put scare-quotes around ‘solves’ because what that really means is ‘makes them go away.’ So at least philosophers, scientists, and citizens could stop worrying about that question (which is rather ill-defined anyway). Note also the blessed vanishing of the mind-body problem. Perhaps also the origin-of-existence problem: if an attribute of mind is free will, then the Universe can simply will itself into being.
Gabriel 02.02.18 at 12:41 pm
@27:
For what it’s worth, Chalmers is completely uninterested in using some kind of soft panpsychism to hand-wave away a lot of complicated phenomena; indeed, he has given talks where he dismisses as philosophically unsound notions of ‘mind’ having intrinsic manipulative properties in quantum mechanics (a common example of woo re: this subject). And, indeed, Dennett (the emergentist anti-Chalmers) has said he’s open to the idea that non-biological information systems have a kind of consciousness. so it’s an idea not confined solely to those on one side of the consciousness debate.
casmilus 02.02.18 at 1:20 pm
The anti-functionalist argument Hilary Putnam gave in “Representation And Reality” turned on the idea that if mind = functional realisation, then lots of non-physical phenomena might be embodying functional descriptions. Which HP took to be a reductio of the idea. But one response from functionalists could be to just accept the consequences. That wouldn’t be “panpsychism” as understood here, but it would be conceding a plurality of minds in the universe.
Z 02.02.18 at 2:27 pm
Anarcissie I put scare-quotes around ‘solves’ because what that really means is ‘makes them go away.’
I agree with everything you write in your last comment. Personally, I think it is more productive to make small incremental positive contributions to the manifold problems of cognition and, for the big-picture inclined among ourselves, play the game of devising large unifying schemes that at do not contradict what we have gleaned from these mundane incremental changes than to play a word trick that redefines the problem in non-existence. You know, first dissect a few cephalopods, then moving on the problems of the final cause of the Universe.
Gabriel Chalmers is completely uninterested in using some kind of soft panpsychism to hand-wave away a lot of complicated phenomena; indeed, he has given talks where he dismisses as philosophically unsound notions of ‘mind’ having intrinsic manipulative properties in quantum mechanics
Probably an unfair question that begs for an RTFM answer but… would you mind explaining to me the panpsychism he is indeed interested in?
Thanks to everyone for a very interesting comment thread, anyway!
MisterMr 02.02.18 at 2:29 pm
Not knowing anything about modern panpsychism, I will still posit that:
1) “mind” is not the same thing of “psyche”, that actually means “soul”, which implies a lot of additional mataphisical stuff;
2) “mind” is also not the same thing as “getting information”, expecially since the term “information” can be used for almiost everything;
3) So if modern panpsychism is limited to “everything gets information”, it’s a bit useless, and in fact it’s a trick to imply metaphisical stuff (“soul”) by mixing it with less metaphisical stuff (“information”).
More relevantly, if everything has got a soul, then everything has a free will, can sin or not sin, and eventually go to heaven or hell – as this is the whole point of the soul, not knowledge. Will photons that behave badly go to hell? I always expected it to be a dark, but not completely black, place.
Whirrlaway 02.02.18 at 7:17 pm
We should distinguish between asserting every part of the Cosmos exhibits psyche* individually, and that the Cosmos does. The later is obviously true since here we are, unless you believe that we are something other than (or in addition to) a manifestation of the said Cosmos. Also. people like to assume that here-and-now is the very pinnacle of things, which is unlikely to be true. There are eons left to run.
* … which I would take to imply consciousness, self-awareness, most particularly intention. Metaphysical if you like, but not necessarily according to Athanasius. Mr.Mr, read your Spinoza.
Gabriel 02.03.18 at 12:10 am
@30
Have you read this? http://consc.net/papers/panpsychism.pdf
(Sorry for RTFM, but at least it’s not a long manual.)
Z 02.03.18 at 12:34 pm
Thanks Gabriel, that’s perfect!
Lee A. Arnold 02.03.18 at 2:14 pm
Not entirely off-topic
“Increased nature relatedness and decreased authoritarian political views after psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression”
Journal of Psychopharmacology, Jan. 17, 2018
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0269881117748902
pdf not behind paywall
James Wimberley 02.03.18 at 2:14 pm
Your proposed newsletter is a fakenewsletter, is it not?
Anarcissie 02.03.18 at 3:02 pm
Gabriel 02.03.18 at 12:10 am @ 33 —
The essay says that we do not have much evidence for panpsychism. However, it seems that each one of us experiences consciousness (zombies and AI programs provisionally excepted) so we have seemingly irrefutable evidence that our material bodies, or at least some part of them, exhibit consciousness. Our physical selves are the only things in the universe we experience directly inside. Everything else is an object we experience from the outside through perception of phenomena and the processes of objectification and interpretation. We can interpret some of what those other objects project as evidences of consciousness or not; it is not direct evidence. Photons and so on up don’t tell us about their experience, which may be too simple for us to understand.
So we have the following score sheet of definite direct evidence:
— material object is definitely at least partially conscious – 1
— material object is definitely not conscious – 0
The preponderance of definite direct evidence for each of us, then, is for panpsychism. It is true it is not absolutely conclusive, but it is way ahead of everything else. This is why I say panpsychism seems reasonable, especially compared to other explanations of consciousness.
John Holbo 02.03.18 at 3:29 pm
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/science/plants-consciousness-anesthesia.html?
Plant consciousness!
John Holbo 02.03.18 at 3:31 pm
“Your proposed newsletter is a fakenewsletter, is it not?”
When reality itself is fake, only fakenews is reality!
Z 02.03.18 at 10:52 pm
Anarcissie @37
I don’t think that the argument you outline is that strong. To begin with, it relies on an unspecified notion of experiencing consciousness, and if you were to make it more specified, some people would dispute that “we” our “our material bodies” exhibit consciousness (that could even be a genuine objection, I know I am conscious when my mind satisfies a number of congruent properties, but as I was reminded last week-end first during semi-anesthesia then full anesthesia, it is very unclear how many element of the lists one can take away with consciousness remaining a meaningful concept).
But even granting we agree on the meaning of consciousness, the ensuing argument proves too much. Consider: I’m the only person I know from the inside. I know the name of my children. Score sheet for
— material object may know the names of my children – 1
— material object definitely does not know the name of my children – 0
You wouldn’t take this as a reasonable argument according to which you know the names of my children, and yet I’m pretty sure you’re a material object.
John Holbo @38
Look for Gallistel-King conjecture on the web and you’ll find pretty strong evidence that single cells are conscious for the narrow technical sense of “being able to compute and learn”.
Alan White 02.04.18 at 4:17 am
Z: Yes. Type-Token equivocations must account for at least a double-digit percentage of wasted philosophical breath on such things.
Whitehead’s systematic anthropomorphism in Process and Reality is some sort of argumentative Everest for panpsychism; I think he would have much appreciated Chalmers’ zombie argument for having scaled it on the East Face.
But I’m with Xenophanes on anthropomorphism as explanation.
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