Panpsychism – Peter Sjöstedt-H

Post Reply New Topic

This is a read version of an article written at the beginning of this year by Peter Sjöstedt-H. He does a good job of combing through the various ideas that suggest it's likelihood and in my search I even ran into rationalwiki's article on it which named at least three problems or roadblocks that panpsychists wished to solve that plagued eliminative materialism, reductive physicalism, and non-reductive physicalism or supervenience.

The article:
http://highexistence.com/panpsychism-3- ... sentience/

Read by the owner of the Ontologistics Youtube channel:

M8, you are scaring the animals...
Too esoteric for me...
Could you give a brief summary, but in english this time...
I.E. Dumb it down...

I linked the article if the reader's accent is difficult to process.

Essentially it's a monism (as opposed to a dualism) that takes consciousness into account. It might not be correct or fully baked, ie. a more accurate iteration might come along, but I like that it gets away from the problems of both eliminative materialism (ie. consciousness has to be an illusion because there's no adequate explanation for it in a dead or unconscious-matter universe) or idealism (which to me doesn't tell us anything useful because calling everything 'mind' just shifts goalposts - we're clearly operating in a range where everything's solid enough to knock on, walk on, and even get killed or gravely injured by which makes it a misleading explanation).

Not sure if that dumbed it down or not, it's probably the best I can offer.

It's quite a flawed argument, though, leaving mind and consciousness undefined.

And, something that follows from the hardcore materialism I adhere to: there is nit really a fundamental difference in how a plant feels pain to how I feel pain, except the vast capacity of the human brain to memorize, abstract, and memorize abstractions.
Consciousness is therefore a function of mental capacity- a dog has less than a human, a plant less than a dog, and so on.

A rock has very little, because there's very little going on inside a rock- not nothing, though.

I mean... Panpsychism as described in this article us basically trying to elevate algorithmic processes to a divine level, therefore argueing that evetything has a soul.
Where I argue: nothing has.

I'd think anyone whose too sure of what it is ends up stepping in a trap which is why he went on more than anything about deductive philosophic arguments rather than talking too much about the science - because the science still isn't at a place where it triages enough of our doubts to really kill outright idealism, naive materialism, or anything between.


I suppose that's a good argument if they mean consciousness in terms of any rich enough to be recognizable to us. I've heard people talk about it in his way - that in this case both you and the plant have awareness (or I've heard Dennett use 'sentience' recently for this sort of boiler plate) but the plant wouldn't have cognition where you would. I think the argument for panpsychism or any sort of neutral monism involving mind and matter is quite likely talking about whether awareness goes all the way down with less concern as to whether it gets profoundly less interesting at each level and more interest in if it indeed does so. If we were to find consciousness in the cognitive sense somewhere else IMHO it would have to be embedded in a media that's capable of as much complexity as our own, or otherwise it would have to be very large in spatial scope to make up the difference.

I think it might be a useful thing to look at because it means, if abiogenesis happened, there could have been something like this sort of cheating raw statistical odds a bit and it might have played a role in evolution - by no means in a god-like manner as people are used to thinking of it but in very small cumulative ways. Additionally I think it might help ground human drives and experiences better into more eternal and timeless laws of the universe (articulated in a very complex fashion) which I think may indeed help us frame the human condition in a less constipated way than than I think our current popular nihilism and even antinatalism would imply.

I can't help but think we are indeed clinging to some very Victorian ways of describing what all of this is and I have my doubts both on whether it's accurate and whether it's helping us all that much to define it that way.

As for hardcore materialism - I'd have to take hardcore to mean dedication. Once fields and all kinds of valid non-contact effects started coming under the domain of physics it seems like the most dedicated idealism and physicalism erode to similarly ambiguous places. I wrote a post here, maybe a year or two ago, when I couldn't help but consider Dan Dennett's eliminativism just breaking strong emergence and pushing things back on substrate. Sure it makes some people feel good but it doesn't really answer any questions. Even aside from that I've also brought up often that I'm still not sure what proper incisive differences there are between the mappings of idealism, phyisicalism and neutral monism although admittedly I find idealism possibly the strangest because it seems to claim some sort of immateriality to things when even if it were true our sense of it's materiality is all we know of for certain.

That makes a lot more sense to me...