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Complex Numbers #982240 added April 28, 2020 at 12:05am
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I Drink Therefore I Am
A while back, I talked about the concept of panpsychism. It's in this entry: "Universal Consciousness"  . In it, I asserted that there was no real evidence for the idea. And if you want to know what the idea is, read that entry that I just linked, and/or take a look at today's article:
https://aeon.co/ideas/why-panpsychism-fails-to-solve-the-mystery-of-consciousnes...
Why panpsychism fails to solve the mystery of consciousness
So, this article is suggesting that not only is there no evidence for it, there might be evidence against it.
Is consciousness everywhere? Is it a basic feature of the Universe, at the very heart of the tiniest subatomic particles? Such an idea – panpsychism as it is known – might sound like New Age mysticism, but some hard-nosed analytic philosophers have suggested it might be how things are, and it’s now a hot topic in philosophy of mind.
Wait, hang on, just hit pause a minute. I need to wrap my head around the phrase "hard-nosed analytic philosophers."
While I'm processing that, this particular article gives a pretty good overview of what exactly panpsychism is, and the "problems" that it would address. Then:
I remain unpersuaded, and I’m not alone in this. Even if we accept that basic physical entities must have some categorical nature (and it might be that we don’t; perhaps at bottom reality is just dispositions), consciousness is an unlikely candidate for this fundamental property.
Yesterday, I talked about the elegance of complexity arising from simplicity. If one argues for a consciousness that pervades all things, that goes out the window. Might as well drop the fancy language and call it God, which turns it into a much older idea.
[Consciousness] appears to be a specific state of certain highly complex information-processing systems, not a basic feature of the Universe.
"Appears to be" is hardly evidence one way or the other.
Panpsychism offers no distinctive predictions or explanations. It finds a place for consciousness in the physical world, but that place is a sort of limbo. Consciousness is indeed a hard nut to crack, but I think we should exhaust the other options before we take a metaphysical sledgehammer to it.
Without predictions or explanations, it's philosophy, not science. This doesn't mean it's necessarily wrong, but, much like ideas such as "honor" or "liberty," it's nothing you can pin down.
So I’m not a panpsychist. I agree with panpsychists that it seems as if our experiences have a private, intrinsic nature that cannot be explained by science. But I draw a different conclusion from this. Rather than thinking that this is a fundamental property of all matter, I think that it is an illusion.
I dislike applying the term "illusion" to something we can call an "emergent property." As Descartes noted, "I think, therefore I am;" as far as I'm concerned -- I know some philosophers will disagree with me -- my consciousness is one of the few things that I can be almost absolutely certain is real. To call it an illusion is to break the entire definition of the word "illusion."
Consciousness, in that sense, is not everywhere but nowhere. Perhaps this seems as strange a view as panpsychism. But thinking about consciousness can lead one to embrace strange views.
It can also lead one to drink. Speaking of which, it's about that time... |
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