Qualia Maximalism

Actuality maximalism holds that for every possible way things could be, things are that way somewhere. The view was infamously defended by David Lewis, who proposed that reality consisted of an infinite number of disconnected space-time regions with every possible space time region existing. 

I’ve never heard anyone express much sympathy with this view, but I don’t think that it should be dismissed too quickly. It is surely weird, but the world might be a weird place. In any case, it offers a very simple and clean vision of reality. The question of why there is something rather than nothing is vexing, but once it is admitted that there is something, we should also ask, why isn’t there everything?

Do we have any evidence for actuality maximalism?

If actuality maximalism were true, then someone somewhere would have a life just like ours filled with our experiences and our evidence. If actuality maximalism were false, then (a priori) we shouldn’t expect someone anywhere to have a life just like ours. The fact that someone does have a life like ours might be taken to count as some evidence for actuality maximalism.

On the other hand, if actuality maximalism were true, then most people would have rather different lives than we do. We live in an ordered universe, which presumably occupies a rather small portion of the variety of possible universes. As such, our perspective may not be quite the average for actuality maximalism.

…

Here is another view which is not altogether unlike actuality maximalism, and which has not, so far as I know, ever been discussed seriously: epiphenomenal qualia maximalism. According to this view, every physical object gives rise to a non-physical mind (just as dualists have thought that a brain gives rise to a mind) for each different way a mind could be. Those minds, in turn, have no impact on the physical objects that produce them. 

On this view, your brain is producing the same thoughts (all of them) all of the time. As is your desk lamp and your copy of consciousness explained. As such, this is a version of panpsychism. Everything has experiences. But it differs from most kinds of panpsychism in that holds that everything not only has a mind, but everything has a mind with every possible experience.

I would guess that most people would find this view more absurd than actuality maximalism. Nevertheless, I think that there is something to be said on its behalf.

…

What I find that I dislike most about dualism is the assumption that the conscious states produced by a brain happen to be aligned so fortuitously with the eclectic physical states that produced them. What seems strange to me is that conscious states seem to depend more on the macroscopic functional characteristics of our brain states than their microphysical constitution. If someone were to hand you a working brain and ask you to examine it closely and figure out what physical states gave rise to (A) conscious states and (B) the same conscious states, you’d be hard pressed to do it. On the other hand, if you had to predict conscious states from behavior, you'd do a much better job.

In light of these sorts of issues, Chalmers proposed bridge laws that connect functional properties up with qualia in such a way that we can’t really be wrong about what qualia we have. Such bridge laws seem like the kind of thing we should only expect if the universe were set up by a benevolent creator who wants us to know our own mental states. It doesn’t seem like the kind of law which would just exist without design.

…

One advantage of qualia maximalism is that it smooths over the weirdness of the phenomeno-functional bridge laws. It isn't weird that functional states of a certain sort produce conscious states of a certain sort. Every physical state produces every conscious state. 

The advantages of qualia maximalism are a lot like the advantages of actuality maximalism. If you were taken to an unfamiliar universe and asked to guess what conscious experiences a particular bit of matter had, “none” would probably be your best guess. After that, is it more reasonable to think “the feeling of a slight toothache” or “all of them”? A priori, “all of them” seems at least as good as any particular guess.

…

Do we have any evidence against qualia maximalism?

The situation seems analogous to actuality maximalism. On the one hand, we have the free evidence that comes from having any conscious state – qualia maximalism predicts that our brain will give rise to that conscious state. On the other hand, our experiences are atypical. They are more ordered than many of the other experiences produced by our brains.