Evolution & Growing Awareness
"And consciousness, however small, is an illegitimate birth in
any philosophy that starts without it and yet professes to explain all facts by continuous evolution._______________________________________________________________________ If evolution is to work smoothly, consciousness in some
shape must have been present at the very origins of things." -William James
William James believed in Pan-psychism just as many modern scientists believe in Pan-psychism.
Are there any flaws in the logic of this quote?
any philosophy that starts without it and yet professes to explain all facts by continuous evolution._______________________________________________________________________ If evolution is to work smoothly, consciousness in some
shape must have been present at the very origins of things." -William James
William James believed in Pan-psychism just as many modern scientists believe in Pan-psychism.
Are there any flaws in the logic of this quote?
Comments (146)
The more philosophy I study, the more complicated the supposedly simple concept of consciousness becomes.
I suggest that instead of arguing from dimly understood concepts and our intuitions about them, we first or also figure out what we are even talking about.
Many people (without giving it much thought, which is the problem) vaguely conceive of consciousness in a way that makes it impossible --by definition -- to investigate said consciousness.
If consciousness is radically private, then there is literally nothing to say about it.
While I don't take p-zombies seriously as a practical matter, I think the idea of the p-zombie is quite valuable in clarifying what is meant by consciousness -- or for clarifying how confused we tend to be about it when it comes to serious, critical thinking.
At least our lack of clarity becomes clearer, in other words.
If we do pretend to be philosophers and think critically, then we should maybe even expect our feelings to be hurt in the process.
You would agree you and i have feeling/awareness correct? Most philosophers would agree some animal below us that evolved from another animal, that the former has feeling/awareness. What the quote mentioned in the OP is saying, wouldn't feeling/awareness be incremental all the way down to atleast the very basic forms of life such as bacteria and possibly viruses. I would even go one step further that this is pretty good evidence that feeling/awareness is one and the same as existence. What do i mean by existence? A Universe or this universe is existence?
Now do you see what the OP means by feeling/awareness/consciousness?
Did my feelings get hurt?
Why?
The OP offers no support for this dubious contention.
We seem to have a rash of panpsychism on the forums; to which the best response remains the incredulous stare.
That was what the OP was implying. Did you see my previous posts or do you want me to repost them? Many modern scientists embrace pan-psychism for similar reasons that i embrace pan-psychism.
Now do you see what the OP means by feeling/awareness/consciousness?
Why do you and i have feeling/awareness? Does a bacteria or virus have some form of feeling or awareness? Does a fish have some form of feeling or awareness?
I'm open to panpsychism, which I offer for context, and I don't think your feelings are hurt. In my experience, though, consciousness is a sensitive issue, connected as it is with religion and in generala hiding place from critical thinking.
Let's say that I grant that you are not a p-zombie or a bot, what does that mean? Even if I use those words, how could you know what those words mean to me in the privacy of my hypothetical mind?
Is consciousness an implicitly solipsistic theory?
Repetition is not constructing an argument...
Again, why should feeling/awareness be incremental all the way down? What feeling or awareness does a rock have?
Quoting Yellow Horse
And here I was beginning to like you...
In regards to the last question, if you and i have consciousness, that would prove right there that it is not a solipsistic theory. At this point in my life i wouldn't characterize myself as sad, but i'm confident there are other real (real) people out there because, i would probably choose to be extremely happy and essentially irrational if i thought i was the only being with feeling or awareness. You know you have feeling or awareness and i know that i have feeling or awareness. I believe that even productive (as opposed to unproductive) rationality requires faith.
In regards to the first things you said, i believe the irrationality of religion is apart of a universal desire among those greater than us, that there should be foolishness in the world. Soccer and football are foolishness but most people don't have a huge problem with that. I don't believe everyone who puts their faith in scientists are critical thinkers. If you or i don't 100% (not 99%) understand the math and the lab results behind a scientific theory, we are (right/wrong/or indifferent) putting our faith in scientists.
If you agree that bacteria and viruses have feeling or awareness, at what point does the bacteria gain feeling or awareness given the fact that most if not all bacteria have dna? How complicated does dna have to be where it gains the ability to have feeling or awareness? What is it about dna or how complicated does dna have to be in order for it to have feeling or awareness?
actually i was thinking about what you said, and i believe that i need to put more thought into my argument. Perhaps (perhaps) we can continue this discussion at a later time.
the problem with the quote isn't a logical one, but a factual one- the idea that a trait or ability "in some shape must have been present at the very origins of things" isn't how we understand evolution to work. Evolution can/does produce novelty: things that are new, things that were not present previously.
I mean, just replace "consciousness" in the quote with something else- say, flight, or sight. Is it true that flight or sight were present "at the very origin of things"? Of course not, the earliest organisms could not see nor fly. And they certainly were not bipedal or able to use tools, like humans. So the quote is just wrong on the facts, as far as how evolution actually works, and so is not a good or persuasive argument for pan-psychism (or anything else) for that reason.
Sure.
My next point would be that, if a rock is unconscious but a bacteria is conscious, there must be some level of complexity at which an unconscious thing becomes conscious. Hence, that would involve some form of emergentism.
And if you are going to adopt emergentism anyway, add panpsycism?
I think you are missing my point. How do you know what I even mean by 'consciousness'? If, that is, the meaning of the word is supposed to live 'in' a consciousness supposed private and inaccessible?
I really haven't given panpsychism much thought, and my leaning is more towards Freud's 'religion of science.'
But I like the idea of facts (as relatively uncontroversial propositions) as something like 'epistemological atoms.' "The world is all that is the case."
I don't think language can be reduced either to consciousness or its other (the physical, etc.) Distinctions like mental/physical occur within language or are language, whatever language is.
This might sound like linguistic idealism, but that is just to assume/insist that language is 'mental.'
Anyway, panpsychism is secondary to my interest in facts as (perhaps) epistemologically primary --- and neither mental or physical.
I don't have the expertise to judge Freud as a psychologist, but I do enjoy reading him as a philosopher. His explores the religious resistance to science in the text below (and also only joked about the religion of science in letters.)
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/at/freud.htm
Emergentism is as odd, prima facie, as panpsychism in the context of a metaphysical phenomenon. "Wet" is a property only at a certain epistemological level of experience- that is to say consciousness, presumably. If we are going by what we know, many properties need a strong correlation with experience in order for it to "arise". Emergence qua emergence (sans observer/experience), may be incoherent. You need a context for which something is emerging. The "jump" to the next level is the magical part. So take your pick, the magic of emergence or the magic of proto-experiential processes.
Yet we are conscious, and rocks are not. If your point is that both emergentism and panpsychism assume some sort of hierarchy, which we might be able to do without, then we agree.
I realize you are already rethinking your position, but let me respond a little more here.
As far as I can tell, the usual conception of consciousness features it precisely as something undetectable, unverifiable--in principle.
It leads to an 'epistemological apocalypse.'
We tend to shrug off solipsists as too silly to bother with, but they are actually a useful symptom of an otherwise unnoticed useless man-in-the-street metaphysics.
How many?
The aboriginals would disagree with you there.
I also checked out a biosemiosis paper linked to by @apokrisis and found what I could understand of it quite fascinating.
It seems that (perhaps) life has always been a coder.
Where we should perhaps be wary is in the unwary collapse of language into consciousness and of objectivity into objects.
To be fair, i would argue Solipsists is a common problem for people who rise to the top and for whatever reason lack alot of relationships. Perhaps there are other people with that problem. I don't know if i've said this but i don't believe i'm alone because i feel if i was alone i would choose to be alot happier. Assuming i'm the figment of someone else's imagination, i dont fault that person for limiting me to this pseudo happiness i have now. I believe the nature of reality is the chief warlord gets the best stuff. I'm certainly not the chief war lord.
123 or possibly 159. Not sure which but its definitely one of those. lol.
Great argument on your part, do i really have to find an article to answer that question as well as that question can possibly be answered? I can find some sort of article if you like.
Basically you would be arguing that one of us quite possibly has a drastically different degree of feeling or awareness? Given the quote from the OP and also the stuff i said through out this forum topic regarding the OP's quote from William James, i don't think the difference in my feeling/awareness to your feeling/awareness would effect the argument i gave. I could repost the quotation along with my unpacking of the quotation if you would like?
Would you agree that feeling or awareness is astronomically more needed for life than flight or walking on 2 legs? If we can't agree on the basics, we'll never agree on the more complicated things.
In a way, yes, but the issue is not so much whether in fact we are radically different on the inside but instead that we can in principle never know one way or the other.
The counter-intuitive idea I'm getting it is that linguistic conventions are 'prior' to so-called minds. Granting that we both have internal monologues, the temptation is to leap from this internal monologue to an immaterial substance.
At the same (just to be clear) I am also against the idea that the word is 'just physical.' I think that meaning exists, but I don't think meaning makes sense as some privately held immaterial substance.
Here is an Aristotle quote that sums up the common sense that I am questioning.
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Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words. Just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images.
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I say that I am questioning it, but really I am just working through the ideas of various philosophers, including perhaps Heraclitus. Here are some quotes that can at least be read in the context of me suggesting that meaning is public.
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They are estranged from that with which they have most constant intercourse.
...
Thought is common to all.
...
To the soul, belongs the self-multiplying Logos.
...
So we must follow the common, yet though my Word is common, the many live as if they had a wisdom of their own.
****
One of the things i was saying earlier is regardless of whether hypothetically we were similar in feeling/awareness or whether we were drastically different, it wouldn't change the premise of William James's quote nor would it change my 2 additions to his quote that explained his quote in further detail. I feel authorized to explain William James's quote considering he is a Pan-psychist. I'm sure me and him disagree on alot of things but we probably agree on why alot of people embrace Pan-psychism.
Let's extend the point I'm trying to make. If the meaning of the James quote was originally 'in' the 'mind' of William James, then neither you nor I could ever make it our own.
If meaning is private, then there's no necessary connection between what James meant and what you take him to have meant.
How are sentences supposed to connect to immaterial mind-stuff?
Instead of using mind-stuff to explain language, it might be better to consider language as an explanation for the questionable hypothesis of mind-stuff. (I'm not saying we are all p-zombies, in case there is any confusion.)
If we go this route (as I think we should), we do not want to fall back into assuming that language is 'really mental.'
This sort of argument strategy you are using, if it was taken serious by a court or an authority figure could basically make nothing matter in terms of right and wrong. Considering i believe in Scientific determinism, and thus all of our actions are the product of particle collisions, i'm not sure i can claim your view is any more defeating of purpose than my view.
Now that i admit that i've lost all motivation to defend my argument. Time to go do something else like perhaps play video games. Well any way have a good night. Perhaps i'll feel motivated to argue later.
Note that I am only trying to demonstrate the problems with precritical thinking about consciousness by showing what such thinking implies.
I don't think my own view implies a nihilism of some sort. Indeed, my view is that all speakers of English (for instance) are profoundly connected just by sharing that language.
The larger idea here is that society is primary, and that man is an especially social animal who is made possible as an interesting individual by his membership in a community.
As far as determinism goes, I don't think a scientific worldview implies philosophical determinism. From what I understand, there is still some controversy on this delicate issue.
Personally I am OK with determinism or its absence.
Even if my actions are all in principle determined, I do not know what I am going to do yet, and I am forced to live with the burden of decision whether or not it is illusory (forgetting for a moment all of the ambiguities here.)
People are let off the hook or punished not in unison with the norm all the time. We only have to live with our decisions only if society collectively decides that we have too. Then we have the issue of guilt. I believe people should forgive themselves as soon as possible. On a different note i believe self-doubt is equal to success but that we should avoid self doubt as much as possible because success isn't all that important. I believe there is a God and that sometimes he does and sometimes he doesn't bring justice. Grace is a product of a lack of justice. God dwells in darkness and to some extent we are figments of his imagination. What he does to us is a product of his justified depression (not to say we usually benefit from his justified depression). If reality allowed God not to be depressed that would be great but i'm not God, so only time will tell.
That is a fascinating theology that I haven't seen before.
Another view is just that we humans taken together in our environment are God, which would also explain God's justified depression.
People who have held this view liked to think that we (as God) were figuring out how to do better. God (through and as us) would be a work-in-progress, largely through our shared language.
From this perspective, both you and me would be little pieces of God, developing God's self-knowledge through conversations like these.
Personally I'm inclined to think that it's all here in this world.
At the same time, we don't know this world all that well yet. We might not know ourselves that well yet.
Well but your OP talks of "consciousness", not "feeling and awareness", so it depends on how these terms are defined. If by "feeling and awareness" you mean only the ability to detect and respond to external stimuli, then the statement is correct but trivial (as the ability to respond to stimuli is part of the biological definition of life, and therefore of necessity common to all forms of life past or present). If you mean "consciousness" in something more like the sense we typically use in the philosophy of mind, then the statement becomes highly problematic.
Are you familiar with Spinoza he was a jew rejected by the jews. He actually resembled the man in Isaiah chapter 53 KJV (not physically attractive at all). Some of his beliefs very much line up with the book of Job, in that we shouldn't assume God or Jesus wants our will but that very often God or Jesus's will is very contrary to what we want. That being said i do think Americans are in general overworked or that was the going trend prior to 6 months ago. That theology i was speaking of is common to some Christians. I am a christian.
Not really. A fundamental part of Consciousness is feeling pain or feeling happiness or somewhere on that spectrum. A fundamental part of Consciousness is being aware of things around you whether tactile or one of the other 5 senses.
I think you are trying to separate these 3 things as though they don't have a relationship. You are way over simplifying things.
Yes, somewhat, and also with thinkers influenced by Spinoza.
Quoting turkeyMan
I was raised Christian. Lots of the thinkers I have read have tried to transform Christianity into something new (more compatible with science and critical thinking, basically.)
This can be charitably described as taking the incarnation more seriously than more traditional Christians take it. (In other words, God is really and only down here with us -- as us.)
I am not trying to proselytize, and the philosophers who think this way will also emphasize that it's metaphorical or symbolic (perhaps also emphasizing that human cognition is largely metaphorical and symbolic.)
I'm just happy to deal with people open to Pan-psychism. Noah Harrari predicted there would be the rise of a new religion in the next 25 to 50 years based on premises in his books. He has great youtube videos. I don't think i'll be a fan of this new religion but i believe many people will us Pan-psychism as a jumping point into this new religion. I believe Pan-psychism is the bridge between naturalism and supernaturalism. However when i use the phrase supernaturalism in the context of Pan-psychism, there is no difference between Natural things and Super natural things because even miracles would be natural under Pan-psychism. This is one of the things i agree with that Spinoza said. I certainly don't agree with everything Spinoza said. I'm only familiar with popular articles about him. I'm very slowly reading this book ethica. I have a text version from projectgutenberg.com.
To make more definite my 'openness to panpsychism,' I'll emphasize my interest in ????? (logos), which is to say (roughly) language, which reduces neither to the 'mental' nor the 'physical', while it glues us all together and allows this sentence to somehow outlive me.
You might say that my 'spirituality' is connected to taking the apparently mundane less for granted.
In other words, ordinary life is freaky and mysterious, if we are just philosophically adventurous enough and not too weighed down with the usual worldly burdens.
I've been reading Sartor Resartus, and there's a passage that illustrates what I am talking about, which I will share here for you and anyone else following our chat. This is from a chapter or section called Natural Supernaturalism.
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Again, could anything be more miraculous than an actual authentic Ghost? The English Johnson longed, all his life, to see one; but could not, though he went to Cock Lane, and thence to the church-vaults, and tapped on coffins. Foolish Doctor! Did he never, with the mind's eye as well as with the body's, look round him into that full tide of human Life he so loved; did he never so much as look into Himself? The good Doctor was a Ghost, as actual and authentic as heart could wish; well-nigh a million of Ghosts were travelling the streets by his side. Once more I say, sweep away the illusion of Time; compress the threescore years into three minutes: what else was he, what else are we? Are we not Spirits, that are shaped into a body, into an Appearance; and that fade away again into air and Invisibility? This is no metaphor, it is a simple scientific fact: we start out of Nothingness, take figure, and are Apparitions; round us, as round the veriest spectre, is Eternity; and to Eternity minutes are as years and aeons. Come there not tones of Love and Faith, as from celestial harp-strings, like the Song of beatified Souls? And again, do not we squeak and gibber (in our discordant, screech-owlish debatings and recriminatings); and glide bodeful, and feeble, and fearful; or uproar (poltern), and revel in our mad Dance of the Dead,—till the scent of the morning air summons us to our still Home; and dreamy Night becomes awake and Day? Where now is Alexander of Macedon: does the steel Host, that yelled in fierce battle-shouts at Issus and Arbela, remain behind him; or have they all vanished utterly, even as perturbed Goblins must? Napoleon too, and his Moscow Retreats and Austerlitz Campaigns! Was it all other than the veriest Spectre-hunt; which has now, with its howling tumult that made Night hideous, flitted away?—Ghosts! There are nigh a thousand million walking the Earth openly at noontide; some half-hundred have vanished from it, some half-hundred have arisen in it, ere thy watch ticks once."
"O Heaven, it is mysterious, it is awful to consider that we not only carry each a future Ghost within him; but are, in very deed, Ghosts! These Limbs, whence had we them; this stormy Force; this life-blood with its burning Passion? They are dust and shadow; a Shadow-system gathered round our ME: wherein, through some moments or years, the Divine Essence is to be revealed in the Flesh. That warrior on his strong war-horse, fire flashes through his eyes; force dwells in his arm and heart: but warrior and war-horse are a vision; a revealed Force, nothing more. Stately they tread the Earth, as if it were a firm substance: fool! the Earth is but a film; it cracks in twain, and warrior and war-horse sink beyond plummet's sounding. Plummet's? Fantasy herself will not follow them. A little while ago, they were not; a little while, and they are not, their very ashes are not."
"So has it been from the beginning, so will it be to the end. Generation after generation takes to itself the Form of a Body; and forth issuing from Cimmerian Night, on Heaven's mission APPEARS. What Force and Fire is in each he expends: one grinding in the mill of Industry; one hunter-like climbing the giddy Alpine heights of Science; one madly dashed in pieces on the rocks of Strife, in war with his fellow:—and then the Heaven-sent is recalled; his earthly Vesture falls away, and soon even to Sense becomes a vanished Shadow. Thus, like some wild-flaming, wild-thundering train of Heaven's Artillery, does this mysterious MANKIND thunder and flame, in long-drawn, quick-succeeding grandeur, through the unknown Deep. Thus, like a God-created, fire-breathing Spirit-host, we emerge from the Inane; haste stormfully across the astonished Earth; then plunge again into the Inane. Earth's mountains are levelled, and her seas filled up, in our passage: can the Earth, which is but dead and a vision, resist Spirits which have reality and are alive? On the hardest adamant some footprint of us is stamped in; the last Rear of the host will read traces of the earliest Van. But whence?—O Heaven whither? Sense knows not; Faith knows not; only that it is through Mystery to Mystery, from God and to God.
I'll see if that book is available on projectgutenberg.com
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1051/1051-h/1051-h.htm#link2HCH0020
I answered the first question. Which question is the poll for?
The quote extends the irreducible complexity argument. One could take it as meaning that any sensitivity to environment (such as in bacteria and elementary particles) is consciousness, but from the name pan-psychism (is this a religion? A lot of people bang on about it here) that is clearly not the kind of consciousness meant. Therefore one has to conclude that the argument is that a conscious multi-celled organism cannot be the distance descendent of a non-conscious single-celled organism, which is patently false.
Does dna cause feeling/awareness? How complex does dna have to be to have feeling/awareness?
Most or all bacteria has dna.
DNA is more complex than anything in the human body.
So you argument is that bacteria or viruses don't have feeling/awareness? Neither of us can prove either way. At this point in time i don't have enough evidence to walk away from Pan-psychism. Neither of us can claim the other is being irrational because we are both making assumptions about single celled organism that react to stimuli (the 7 traits of things with life). Belief in Pan-psychism is no more irrational than putting our faith in scientists. If you and i don't 100% understand the math and lab results behind the scientific theory, right/wrong/or indifferent you and i are putting our faith in scientists.
Once again you and are making assumption about viruses and bacteria that react in a similar way to stimuli which is similar to robots.
This equates "causing awareness" with "having awareness", which is not valid.
Quoting turkeyMan
That is a choice, not a condition. Everyone is free to understand the maths and results.
Quoting turkeyMan
The major differences are a) bacteria are biological, and b) robots have function. Bacteria can have uses, but they have no function. A better comparison would be between bacteria and non-living organic chemicals, since both are at least organic and neither have function, even if they have uses.
Pan-psychism is the assumption that all things have or are part of a consciousness. A valid argument to support that assumption cannot be: well, that's just an assumption.
Hmm, not sure about hierarchy. In the idea that no level of experience is more privileged?
Anyways, it is more like mereological nihilism. Emergentism seems to be something that happens in epistemological contexts. Beyond that, there is no point of view that persists for things to emerge. Rather, it is some form of simples (e.g. strings, quarks, leptons, etc.) arranging themselves in various ways.
When things arise, they are arising into something. When experience arises, "where" is it arising? It's a process we can say, but that is just linguistic equivocating. Making something a process doesn't banish the phenomenon to just "another phenomenon" like the formation of sand dunes. This process is the context for all other phenomenon to arise in the first place.
You would have to see my earlier arguments. I can repost them if you like.
Yet we are conscious, and rocks are not. If your point is that both emergentism and panpsychism assume some sort of hierarchy, which we might be able to do without, then we agree. — Banno
Hmm, not sure about hierarchy. In the idea that no level of experience is more privileged?
Anyways, it is more like mereological nihilism. Emergentism seems to be something that happens in epistemological contexts. Beyond that, there is no point of view that persists for things to emerge. Rather, it is some form of simples (e.g. strings, quarks, leptons, etc.) arranging themselves in various ways.
When things arise, they are arising into something. When experience arises, "where" is it arising? It's a process we can say, but that is just linguistic equivocating. Making something a process doesn't banish the phenomenon to just "another phenomenon" like the formation of sand dunes. This process is the context for all other phenomenon to arise in the first place.
Consider what schopenhauer1 said and then get back to me. Perhaps i didn't personally explain the OP well enough.
Yes, really, and these things being related (as they obviously are) isn't the same thing as them being synonymous and interchangeable, such that you can swap them out as needed to help your argument. So again, if you are only talking about e.g. the ability to respond to external stimuli, then the proposition is true but trivial/tautologous, but if you are talking about consciousness in a more robust sense, something like the sense we mean in the philosophy of mind, then there's absolutely no reason to think it must have existed "in some shape since the very origin of things" and that it did not emerge at some point like other traits that are lacking in earlier life-forms.
Would you say every particle in the universe is at least slightly Windows 7 ?
So I am actually in agreement with the OP, although I don't like the terminology. "Consciousness" is what we have, and comes with the ability to think. The ability to think requires stored sensory information (memory, in the broadest sense of the word), and the ability to observe that stored information at will.
Animals are generally not conscious, except the more cognitively advanced ones. I differentiate between consciousness and awareness; awareness being a component of consciousness, but not necessitating the ability to think--only to experience. We can induce a difference in quality of consciousness between species, and also basic awareness that is clearly not conscious in lower level animals and species. I assume there is some level of awareness present in an ant, for example (it does, after all, have a brain). A simple pleasure/pain mechanism does not answer the whole question of how does the ant know whether pleasure is good or pain is bad? On a basic level, that seems to be the fundamental role of awareness: "this is good for me," vs "this is bad for me."
So why wouldn't that variance in levels of awareness go all the way down to the most basic organisms? We see the pattern at the top end, but when we get down to the atomic level, the resemblance to consciousness is entirely gone. But a level of awareness so simple wouldn't resemble consciousness anyway.
But this is not an entire argument, and I doubt a complete, scientifically based argument for "panpsychism" (I hate that nomenclature...) will be made any time soon. I do think there is a metaphysical argument that I can add, though, and it is the same one I use to refute determinism. That is that if causality is constant, and we truly are observers of a mind that is determined by external forces, we would not have self-awareness. We would have awareness of the illusory self, but not of the observer. Yet we do have that awareness, and therefore part of the determination is our own: we are, at least partly, self-determined. This means that both the mind and the physical self exist as they seem to and are connected. Consciousness is the product of material, and also interacts with that material. And since the locus of consciousness is not any one atom, and it seems to be a complex system of material even though it is experienced singularly, I deduce from this that the "observer" is not distinct from one experience to another: but there is no other way to experience being, say, a person, than for it to seem as if you are separate and distinct. The material, after all, is separate and distinct.
Like it or not we are both making assumptions at this point.
Ofcourse Windows 7 was a decent operating system.
Third time's a charm! Quoting schopenhauer1
Emergence needs to take place with an observer. Otherwise it is just simples doing what they do (mereolgoical nihilism- arranging themselves in certain ways). Think Kant, or Kant-think.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Everything else arises in the "where" of an observer. Whence does the observer arise?
Quoting schopenhauer1
So you you might make the move to call the phenomenon of experience a process and thus think you have done something clever. But you haven't. This changes nothing. The formation of sand dunes is also a process.. this one called experience seems just a tad different then all other processes? And what is that difference from other processes?
Quoting schopenhauer1
Emergentism is the thesis that things doing what they do produces an observer.
So I can't see that anything novel has happened in this argument. SO, yes, nothing has changed.
Ah yes, this is not odd at all.
If it is all simples doing what they do, what is the new phenomena clutter that is added to this metaphysics?
The plastic bottle to my left is partially Windows 7? I don't think so brah.
If panpsychism logic is true, follows that the components and materials of computer hardware must themselves have desktop interfaces.
Putting aside your own "incredulous stare" at the mere idea:
a) emergentism has no observer, just added clutter to the simples.
b) panpscyhism has the observer in the simples
Well, no, it produces the observer. That's rather the point.
My 2 cents worth:
An instance of consciousness leads to the next instance of consciousness, but also time, according to Einstein is an illusion, what we really have is change. So consciousness orients us in the change. Consciousness exists on a spectrum – it fluctuates throughout the day, is focal, and multifocal, can disassociate– can split into two and reflect on itself, sleep is a sort of suspended consciousness, not fully unconscious like anesthesia.
Consciousness develops over a lifetime in response to more information. It is self learning and programming and thus creative as the information at hand is always less then perfect, yet consciousness must integrate it into a reality.
It is best characterized as a state of entangled,integrated and unified information and emotion. The emotion is primary, and dominant, and thoughts can be characterized as bundles of emotion wrapped up in reason – often tenuously so.
Consciousness = thought + emotion = experience
Linguistics places a limitation on communication, and we have two similar words for consciousness.
1: consciousness: highlights the reasoned awareness aspect.
2: experience: highlights the emotional effect
Consciousness can be swapped out with experience in any sentence to gain a slightly different perspective on what is being said. You can play with this in the posts of this thread.
Re the OP, consciousness and life must have emerged together as life needs impetus and this is what emotional consciousness provides. This is what a P.Zombie lacks.
Finally, when you speak of consciousness what you are describing is yourself!
The simples make arrangements. How does the observer come out of the arranging of simples?
That is the very thing to be explained in emergentism.
We don't know. Nevertheless, that is the thesis.
Agreed. Thus my original claim:
Quoting schopenhauer1
Looks more like you were equivocating and that the argument in the OP falls apart if required to define its terms and then stick to them. Either the proposition is trivial and uninformative, or just factually incorrect as to how evolution works (i.e. its ability to generate and select for novel traits and abilities).
This is something that consciousness will decide! :cool:
i guess.
i guess.
This is something that credulousness will decide! :cool:
Why do you think consciousness is different from nearly all other properties such that it cannot reasonably be emergent?
What does this mean? If you mean emergence is not observed, and observation is the keystone, the fact that nothing consistent with consciousness has ever been observed in rocks suffices to reject pan-psychism. But I disagree with the assumption: emergentism does have witnesses, i.e. it has evidence. Panpsychism does not.
If you mean that emergence does not yield observers, that is just the irreducible complexity argument again which really needs to be laid to rest. Nature has proven it otherwise.
i don't have a great answer for you right now. Perhaps i'll get to this some other day.
Every behaviour of a rock is consistent with its being conscious isn't it? The whole of the problem of other minds is predicated on the decoupling of behaviour from consciousness, such that we cannot reliably conclude from behaviour alone whether or not some object or creature is conscious without assuming a theory that couples them.
EDIT: to be clear on my position, I do think that the behaviour of a rock is evidence of its consciousness, but only because I have already assumed panpsychism. I need to show panpsychism by other means before I can conclude that the behaviour of a rock is evidence of its consciousness.
EDIT2: I guess it's one of those awkward situations when what counts as evidence depends on one's theories, definitions and assumptions.
At what level of consciousness is this observer produced? Is there an observer in the case of insects? This is only part of the argument, but you do admit there seems to be a range of degrees to consciousness/awareness?
And we know that consciousness depends on the coordination of a lot of divisible material. Theoretically we could remove any individual particle of your brain without destroying that observer.
Then we've got the fact that the observer interacts with the material, while none of that material is solely necessary for the production of the observer. This implies that there is a direct connection between the material and the observer. It is more than just a product of the material, it is inexorably linked to this material...
But then how can this combination of material be disrupted without changing the experience of the observer? It must be then that the observer is not limited, only the experience seems that way.
But objects have relations to other objects. What is the nature of these relations?
Ironically, by viewing it as if it is an "object that a human perceives", then you are already making this a human epistemological phenomena rather than something happening in itself. The objects relate to others on their own terms, not in the human perception of it.
Notice I said nothing about consciousness here. Nor did I earlier. You asserted that.
It sorta goes with the OP.
I don't know.
Is your argument that hence, panpsychism?
Sure, like I said, depending on how broadly the terms are defined here the proposition can be fairly uncontroversial: "awareness", if defined as the ability to react to (i.e. be "aware" of) external stimuli is part of the biological definition of life and so common to all living organisms, presumably even the very first ones. If that's all that's meant- no problem. But not much interesting follows from this, as it is trivial/tautologous (true as a matter of definition, rather than as a matter of fact), and it certainly doesn't entail that pan-psychism in any robust sense is true. On the other hand, a far stronger concept- i.e. of "consciousness", as normally defined in the philosophy of mind- renders the OP's proposition (that consciousness was present "in some shape from the very origin of things") false as a matter of fact: the earliest organisms lacked many traits and abilities, including consciousness no less than flight or sight or bipedalism or plenty of other things besides (so far as the evidence tells us, at any rate).
For what its worth, I'm "open" to pan-psychism in the sense that I don't reject it out of hand and that I'd always be willing to consider new evidence or arguments in its favor.. I just think that the OP's isn't a good or sound argument for it, since its either trivial (and its conclusion non-sequitur) or just wrong about how evolution works.
Don't know what that means. The OP was a poll.
Here is what a facebook user said on the issue and then i have some follow up things to consider:
"I have been intellectually invested heavily in pantheism for about 4 years now, and I would argue that the correlation does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that the chemical activity in the brain creates consciousness in it’s entirety. That presumption lies under a hidden premise, that premise is that the electrochemical mechanisms of the brain are fundamental to the supposed “essence” of consciousness. Who’s to say it’s not the opposite? What if the causal arrow is pointed the wrong way and consciousness creates reality, in the most literal sense possible. Of course I am not referring to the limited notion of consciousness that denotes individual psyches but rather a fundamental code like source of consciousness and matter based reality, some people call it pure consciousness or pan-consciousness, some people call it the program to our simulation. It’s really a matter of first principles because even if you rely on the premise that electrochemical activity is fundamental, you have to determine what is fundamental to that, what drives the engine of creation that is our universe? Pantheistic ontologies would suggest that the universe itself is a complex adaptive system that expresses itself through both physical reality and organically confined fragments of individuated consciousness."
Also you should consider that if lower forms of life (lower than humans), don't have feeling or awareness, then what motivates them to reproduce and survive?
Why wouldn't a bacteria have motivation to reproduce and survive? Why does dna do what it does? Same for viruses? If something reacts to stimuli, we should be open to it possibly having feeling or awareness. I kill cockroaches because im not a cockroach and i could go down a long list of other reasons why including they eat each other. I don't kill humans because i'm a human and i have faith.
There seems to be some suspect "I am not part of the universe" kind of thing going on in this reasoning.
By parallel evolution I mean the existence of both mind and body "from the first stirrings of life", as a man who had a way with words once put it, and the two co-evolved into its present form.
Serial evolution, on the other hand, is the position that the mind/consciousness emerged from the physical, the body, much much later - with the rise of complex life. In this case, the mind/consciousness didn't exist when life first began.
The difficulty here, for William James, is that, unlike the body, used here as a stand-in for the physical aspect of life, the mind/consciousness doesn't leave behind a footprint à la fossils which [mind] archaeologists can dig up , study, and prove William James right.
Now that I think of it, do fossils of ancient life, specifically those known to be truly primitive as in representing the first batch of living organisms to appear on earth, show any evidence of mental phenomena?
What occurs to me is that 'mind/consciousness' seems to be implicitly defined as a footprintless ghost. Language must always be mere clothing, a mere sheet draped over this ghost.
But what if language is only a dead sheet because we insist that it 'must' be?
Can't our words here be footprints? Or --better --the feet themselves?
I don't see how words can be evidence of mind/consciousness.
What would be? And if there is no evidence and there even can't be evidence, why are you so sure about this mind/consciousness stuff?
How can it have any function at all in a rational/critical conversation?
One could make a similar point about denying this consciousness-stuff to rocks. What is being denied? What are we checking for and not finding?
For the moment if we make an effort to avoid the point of view that leads to solipsisim and confine ourselves to common sense, there is little doubt as to what I and others refer to as "mind/consciousness". The mind/consciousness, the common sense take on it, is what's missing in rocks and other non-sentient objects.
True, but then that's just ignoring the issue, which is that a certain conception of consciousness threatens us with its solipsistic implications.
You mention common sense, or common meaning, or...meaning in common. That's it. Meaning is public, conventional.
Perhaps 'my' toothache is ineffably 'mine' or 'private' because 'around here' we don't ask people to prove they have a toothache.
Quoting TheMadFool
I do know what you mean, more or less, so the issue is really just challenging this all-too-automatic take on it. If we zoom in on it, we see that it can't work the way it's supposed to, IMO.
Let's discuss this "public" meaning then. Do you find this "public" definition of consciousness deficient/incorrect/misleading (or all of the above) or are you implying that consciousness is, if I catch your drift, part of a Wittgensteinian language game?
I do recall Wittgenstein's beetle in a box thought experiment. Are you trying to say that consciousness maybe radically different to different people but the word "consciousness" is being used in the public domain to whatever that goes on in our heads so to speak?
To be frank, I don't see a problem at all because consciousness is, to my understanding, defined very loosely, it's a sloppy definition as it were and approximates what I referred to as "whatever that goes on in our heads". Being so, it can't be that we can be mistaken about each other's conception of consciousness for the difference, if there is any, between my consciousness and another person's consciousness is in the details and not in the general outline. Returning to Wittgenstein's beetle in a box, none of the people in this scenario can be in error about there being something in the box - this somethingness is what the word "consciousness" refers to. As such "consciousness", the word, lacks details necessary to enable a precise conception of what it actually is.
Quoting Yellow Horse
:chin:
Well if you have no feeling about the answer, how do you even know other people are conscious? Saying "I don't know," sounds like you're leaving the door open for solipsism.
The only thing is that "consciousness" is used quite loosely depending on the source. The people who follow Eckart Tolle, or Buddhists in general, like to say things like "pure consciousness" to describe a state of awareness without thought. That is not a useful way of using the term for me, as to me consciousness is awareness + context (which depends on memory: short term, long term, and sensory).
I see what you mean..
You seem to have a very narrow definition of consciousness.
Presumably you are not an advocate of mind/body dualism.
Emergentism almost always resorts to a (hidden) dualism. Whether weak emergence or strong emergence. There was physical stuff and now there is physical and mental stuff.
Sophisticated forms of panpscyhism aren't saying "matter = consciousness". Most would qualify their panpsycism as describing some sort of relational process between the simples/objects.
This simply bypasses the dualism by attributing the epistemology to a metaphysics. That's why words such as "proto-experientialism" are used.
You are still thinking of objects as things that are perceived by humans. But if objects have relational qualities with other objects, then there is a springboard for more complex relationships to form. The key here is the relationships are their own relationship, not the relationship, you the Banno observer have given it by your own relationship with the object. There are many levels of object-to-object relationship on their own terms, that are nothing to do with the human-to-object terms.
The problem I see with anti-pan-experientialist advocates is that they are looking at the human-to-object terms as if that is the relationships other objects have with each other. They are using their own epistemology to project a metaphysics.
I'd say that the 'precritical' public meaning works just fine for getting along in the world but leads to problems (like solipsism) if it is embraced as a foundation for the rest of philosophy.
Here's Aristotle:
*****************************************************************************************************************
Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words. Just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images.
*****************************************************************************************************************
Is this not an excellent sketch of today's common sense? But Wittgenstein's beetle passage shows (with the rest of his work) that the supposed 'mental experiences' bear no weight.
Arguments are made of words, not otherwise ineffable what-it-was-like.
That's good for us, since objectivity depends on the publicity of meaning.
Aristotle's passage tries to save us from solipsism by assuming such mental experiences are common, but why would one think this if not because of social-linguistic conventions?
Indeed, these 'mental experiences' are caught up in such conventions, so there's something problematic in asserting or denying a 'consciousness' whose role in the game is to point at what can never be checked (in the 'purity' of its concept, as ineffable.)
I don't disagree. It's just that this not-being-able-to-be-error is the problem. If we want to be 'rational' about consciousness, how can it also be something that we are never wrong about?
I don't deny this somethingness. I remember being awake all night waiting for an emergency dentist appointment for a tooth extraction.The pain was terrible and 'mine.'
But pain and the sense that 'there is a there there' seem to be outside of objectivity, at least inasmuch as they are private (in a 'purity' of their concepts which would put them 'under' or 'behind' social conventions.)
If consciousness is a private somethingness (some beetle in the box), then we can't even check whether we have the same (private) meaning 'in mind' when we use the word 'consciousness.'
If meaning is private, conversation is pointless.
If meaning (a kind of somethingness) is private and yet we are uncritically confident that mental experiences are the same for all, why is that?
Is it because other humans also have human faces? Because our public doings are carefully synchronized? Because humans respond complexly to their environment?
Is a dandelion "not conscious" because we have checked (forgetting for a moment that we can't even know what agreement would mean here, giving the assumptions being challenged)?
Or just because it doesn't respond to its environment (including other dandelions) in a sufficiently complex way?
But what if we zoom in and consider the complicated coding of its DNA? Aren't individual cells staggeringly complex?
I'm not claiming that plants are conscious (or that they aren't).
The issue is figuring out what we are even talking about.
Slippery slope fallacy.
I'll take that as praise. Compared to those who think rocks are conscious, yes I do.
Metaphysics is where you make stuff up because you don't know what's going on. It's not compulsory. One can simply admit to not knowing.
That, @Kev as well. See @Yellow Horse's replies to @TheMadFool, above. Wittgenstein shows you how to extract yourself from the fly bottle of metaphysics; Of course, if you are having fun in there, well, be my guest. But don't insist that I join you.
brb
You make it sound like some people don't have consciessness.
Feeling and Awareness are different from all other properties. All other properties in the universe actually stem from feeling and awareness. How do we accurately measure which particle collisions or wave collisions cause feeling or awareness. Even solid objects are essentially and relatively slow moving particle collisions or wave collisions. It is a huge mistake to assume that feeling and awareness isn't drastically different than nuclear fusion or nuclear fission. There is nothing in the universe stranger than feeling and awareness. Why would you say otherwise?
Not true. There are things that are absolutely knowable, like the fact that existence exists and consciousness exists. We know that there is a difference between our consciousness and the rest of existence. This is a starting point. From here we can verify our sensory information, because it is not the product of our consciousness, but of the greater reality along with our physiology.
So how do you know other people are conscious? You relate to them, and make the assumption, right? So why isn't that valid when taken to simpler life forms? Of course you can relate to a dog less than you can relate to a chimp, and a mouse less than a dog. But we can deduce that the difference is mainly due to a difference in intelligence.
If consciousness depends on intelligence, but is not just intelligence, what is the rest? The awareness component... can that exist with zero intelligence? Why couldn't it?
Rand. :down: You gonna have to work to get respect now.
Quoting Kev
So you want I should relate to a rock, and make the assumption that it is conscious.
Nuh.
Well, it's obvious we don't know. Nothing wrong with speculative metaphysics. You think you Kant do it, and rely on Witt to get you out of thinking about it :razz:.
It's just Spike Milligan, Lewis Carrol, Edward Lear, are better at nonsense than Kant or your namesake. :razz:
Quoting schopenhauer1
Even when it convinces you that rocks are conscious? I'm not so sure...
But yet you failed to acknowledge what I said:
a) Presumably you are not a mind/body dualist, and thus emergentism fails to satisfy the anti-dualist (physical stuff here, then physical and mental stuff there).
b) Objects relate to each other in some way that isn't Banno's perceptions of how other objects relate to each other.
If you don't acknowledge that and go straight to naysaying and poo pooing.. that's just dodging the argument with I'm just going to call it something like "fallacy of incredulousness"..aka Banno's gorilla picture in the dictionary next to...
I've long argued that the distinction is misleading.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I'm not sure what the word "perception" is doing there. It's unclear what you are claiming, so I'm not sure if I agree, disagree, or defer.
Orangutang, not gorilla.
You're really making me question your reading comprehension.
Not really. Body- neural pathways, chemicals, molecules, cells, etc. Mind- seeing, hearing, sensing a food particle (if you're something like a fish), fear, fleeing from pain, finding something funny, etc.
Quoting Banno
It's the view without an animal observer. What is reality in itself? You think the persistent image of what you experience? That's naive realism at its finest. Poor naive orangutan Banno.
Stoopid question #1.
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Contextomy
If it's ineffable, don't try to "eff" it.
That is, don't pretend to use it in your metaphysics.
Quoting Yellow Horse
Quoting Yellow Horse
Quoting Yellow Horse
So I was correct in thinking you're concerned about the meaning of the word "consciousness" in a Wittgensteinian sense.
Is the idea of language games self-referential? Could it be that Wittgenstein's point of view is itself a language game? I see no reason why not and if so should we be applying the theory of language games so liberally to all conceivable discourse as if the theory itself is immune to its own brand of criticisms?
If Wittgenstein's theory of language games is itself a language game then doesn't that reduce its applicability for the simple reason that being just a language game, it too is restricted, severely so, to its form of life, no?
That out of the way, as I mentioned earlier, the word "consciousness" is more a general outline of the stuff that happens inside our heads than a detailed description of those things and being so, the chances of us being so mistaken about what the word "consciousness" refers to that all discussion become pointless is negligibly small.
That from one who quotes Rand...
Being a language game is not a bad thing...
Well, I thought it invalidated philosophies built around certain words that lacked an essence, the very thing philosophy seems to be about.
Problems arise with irregularities; such as when the words are moved to a different language game with insufficient care.
Why don't you try to make an actual point? Otherwise why even comment?
If not, and yet people are, then at some stage between rocks and people, consciousness emerges.
I never said ineffable. Just not the animal/human perception of it.
Quoting Banno
I was discussing Speculative Realism with @fdrake. One of the things that makes it different I guess is that they are willing to make speculative metaphysical theories. There are some interesting ones like here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_ontology
The main step that speculative realism wants to get rid of is Kantian Correlationsism. Oddly, for disliking Kant, you seem to be steeped in that thinking in this thread at least.
[quote=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_ontology]Related to 'anthropocentrism', object-oriented thinkers reject correlationism, which the French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux defines as "the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other".[12] Because object-oriented ontology is the realist philosophy, it stands in contradistinction to the anti-realist trajectory of correlationism, which restricts philosophical understanding to the correlation of being with thought by disavowing any reality external to this correlation as inaccessible, and, in this way, fails to escape the ontological reification of human experience.[13][/quote]
There is also Quentin Meillasoux's idea of hyper-chaos:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quentin_Meillassoux
There is also good old process philosophy by people like Whitehead and the likes.
All of them are willing to look at the world beyond human perceptions into the things themselves. However, the point is you don't have to commit to one version of this, but just be open that there might be a version.
And at some point a pile of dirt becomes a hill. Doesn't mean the hill "emerged," only the abstract concept. It would seem that electricity is an emergent property, but again, nothing is being created... only a concept.
Let's use "awareness," because consciousness is the ability to think. Awareness is simply the quality of experiencing. To use our level of consciousness as the standard to measure awareness is obviously not going to be effective. There's no reason to assume that a lack of intelligence signifies a lack of awareness.
:smile: Even one in the hard sciences would impress me. There are probably a few out there.
Yes. I am open to Panpsychism. But you should expect that some on this forum will be prejudiced against the concept of universal consciousness, due to its prevalence in New Age mystical & magical notions. Yet, there is growing acceptance of a more scientific understanding that the potential for mind & consciousness was somehow inherent in the Big Bang. William James came to his conclusion, long before New Ageism emerged, and it was based on pragmatic logic, not on empirical evidence. Psyche (Mind) is a metaphysical concept, so its existence in physical objects is counter-intuitive, and inexplicable, to those committed to a Materialist worldview.
Since Consciousness is not physical, but metaphysical, direct empirical evidence is hard to come by. You can't X-ray a rock to see if it contains awareness of its environment. But many modern scientists have inferred that the emergence of Mental & Metaphysical phenomena was not an accident, but implicit in the constitution of the Singularity that gave birth to our world. Panpsychism is not yet the orthodox view of mainstream Science, but there seems to be a burgeoning "new paradigm" among younger scientists. :smile:
Panpsychism : And whilst physicalism offers a simple and unified vision of the world, this is arguably at the cost of being unable to give a satisfactory account of the emergence of human and animal consciousness. Panpsychism, strange as it may sound on first hearing, promises a satisfying account of the human mind within a unified conception of nature.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/
The Incredulous Stare : Many people, both philosophers and non-philosophers, find deeply counterintuitive the idea that fundamental constituents of the physical world, such as electrons, have conscious experience. And many take this to be a good reason not to take panpsychism seriously.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/#IncrStar
Panpsychism :
Literally, “all mind”. The belief that everything material, however small, has an element of Mind. Higher, more complex, forms of Mind are called “awareness” or “consciousness”. Lower & simpler forms are called “energy” or “information”.
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page16.html
New Ageism :
An alternative religious movement that spread through the occult and metaphysical communities in the 1970s and 80s. It looked forward to a “New Age” of love and light and offered a foretaste of the coming era through personal transformation and healing. The movement’s strongest supporters were followers of modern esotericism, a religious perspective that is based on the acquisition of mystical knowledge and ritual magic. Its eclectic doctrines borrow from Eastern & Western occult traditions. Note : although some of its pandeistic & panpsychic cosmology may seem similar to Enformationism, its antiscience & irrational attitude is in opposition.
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page16.html
The EnFormAction Hypothesis :
http://bothandblog3.enformationism.info/page23.html
Physics of Consciousness : https://www.closertotruth.com/interviews/55454
Imagine the silent screams of the rubble in the driveway, when running them over with the car. :scream:
(Any "defender of the defenseless" is going to be really busy.)
How do panpsychists live anyway?
What is one to do with junk thinking such as this?
Yep, hills are piles of dirt.
Electrons are measurable, manipulable, adn calculable. The awareness of a rock, not so much.
It was not the concept of electricity, but electricity, that boiled the water for my coffee. I climb the hill, not the concept of the hill.
What evidence do you have that rocks are aware?
I think that might be enough. As I said, someone who quotes Rand has a long way to go to gain respect. The lack of critical thought that infects her disciples is evident here. There's nothing for me in your posts.
lol I never said rocks are aware. I did say I think insects are aware, and I don't think awareness is an emergent property... but we only acknowledge it as such when it crosses a certain threshold.
We are collections of atoms, yet our experience is singular. Either we are the atoms, or we are some magical observer that only experiences the information that the atoms produce. I am not a dualist, but perhaps you are. That would definitely be junk thinking.
Quoting Banno
We can't measure it, so it must not exist. Electrons are measurable, NOW, but there was a time not too long ago that they weren't. Amazing how the truth can change... None of these are good arguments. I'm assuming you accept that there are degrees to awareness/consciousness, although you keep strawmanning by saying "rocks aren't conscious," but you don't leave open any possibility that awareness could be on such a basic level that you can't relate to it.
Quoting Banno
The point is whether you call it a hill or a collection of dirt it's the same thing. Consciousness could very well be a bottom-up phenomenon... a product of the collaboration of minimally aware particles.
...or, we're implemented by the atoms.
What to do with this. As if anaesthetic did not exist. AS if one did not sleep. As I said, you are credulous, I'm incredulous.
I agree that it's the appropriate response for a Physicalist. But for some of us the most important things in the world are non-physical. And Consciousness remains the "hard problem" for Physicalism : how does matter know anything?
However, if Mind is somehow intrinsic to the material world, then the emergence of Mind from Matter is not a problem. And that is the logically credible postulate of my Enformationism thesis. If Information is more fundamental than matter, then matter & mind are both forms of Information. But what is Information? It may not be what you think, or believe. :nerd:
Physicalism : "the Panpsychism problem"
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/
Consciousness : "information integration theory"
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/
Consciousness :
Literally : to know with. To be aware of the world subjectively (self-knowledge) and objectively (other knowing). Humans know Quanta via physical senses & analysis, and Qualia via meta-physical reasoning & synthesis. In the Enformationism thesis, Consciousness is viewed as an emergent form of basic mathematical Information.
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page12.html
Is Information fundamental? :
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/is-information-fundamental/
https://www.closertotruth.com/series/information-fundamental
Information :
Knowledge and the ability to know. Technically, it's the ratio of order to disorder, of positive to negative, of knowledge to ignorance. It's measured in degrees of uncertainty. Those ratios are also called "differences". So Gregory Bateson* defined Information as "the difference that makes a difference". The latter distinction refers to "value" or "meaning". Babbage called his prototype computer a "difference engine". Difference is the cause or agent of Change. In Physics it’s called "Thermodynamics" or "Energy". In Sociology it’s called "Conflict".
Your implication here is that without memory experience cannot exist. We know the brain stays very active during sleep. We know we dream, and for the most part have no memory of what we experienced.
What you're doing is analogous to picking up a single piece of dirt and saying, "This is not a hill." No... it's not a hill, very good. And observing electrons orbiting a nucleus doesn't really give one the impression they can be used to boil water. "This thing on one end of the spectrum doesn't resemble this thing on the other end," is not good logic. We know there is a range of awareness at the top end; the extent of that range being largely subjective. We know animals with eyes can see.
So while some may look at the brain and think it's "just material," and potentially arrive at a determinist perspective, I think it's important to scrutinize the "just" part. If I was a determinist I wouldn't bother.
When someone brings up the issue of language games when discussing a philosophical issue, I'm led to believe that that amounts to dismissing it as a non-issue, any significance it is thought to possess being nothing more than confusion caused by misunderstanding language. The bottomline is that to invoke Wittgenstein's language game is to accuse someone of being confused. :chin:
Quoting jgill
Yes, there are a few "hard" scientists out there who take the notion of Panpsychism seriously. It's not yet mainstream, but the "soft" sciences of Information Theory and Systems Theory are pioneering the study of Nature for clues to how & why Life & Mind emerged from the physical process of Evolution. Most of the research is based on Information & Computation theories. Hard physicists, who are still searching for the bottom line of physics by smashing particles, are not likely to encounter many signs of Life or Mind. But, softer Quantum Theorists, are dealing with much mushier aspects of reality, and may be more open to the idea that a potential for Life & Mind was inherent in the original Singularity program, in the form of non-physical Information. Since Life & Mind are not physical phenomena, but metaphysical functions, their study is often limited to "soft" Theory, rather than "hard" empirical Practice.
If you're interested in some cutting edge research, I recommend the 2017 book by members of the Santa Fe Institute for interdisciplinary theoretical research (outside traditional boundaries). The collaborative book is From Matter to Life : Information and Causality, and it's editors include a Physicist, an Astrobiologist, and a Mathematical Cosmologist. Among the contributors are not one, but seven, physicists, along with Biologists, Chemists, Mathematicians, Philosophers, and Psychologists. This is cutting-edge stuff, so those whose knowledge of science remains in the 20th century may not be aware that the "soft" sciences are beginning to play a prominent role in the science of the Information Age.
For obvious reasons, the book does not mention the ancient term Panpsychism. But its core concept, that Life & Mind & Matter are all forms of metaphysical Information, is a modern formulation of the same notion. An early expression of that view was pioneering physicist John Archibald Wheeler ("it from bit"), who said : “All things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe… Observer-participancy gives rise to information.”. This book is not for the general public, but for those who have the scientific background to appreciate the implications of state-of-the-art research. :nerd:
Santa Fe Institute : . . . an independent, nonprofit theoretical research institute located in Santa Fe (New Mexico, United States) and dedicated to the multidisciplinary study of the fundamental principles of complex adaptive systems, including physical, computational, biological, and social systems. The Institute is ranked 25th among the world's "Top Science and Technology Think Tanks" . . .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Fe_Institute
From Matter to Life : https://www.amazon.com/Matter-Life-Information-Causality/dp/1107150531/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=from+matter+to+life&link_code=qs&qid=1594489873&sourceid=Mozilla-search&sr=8-2&tag=mozilla-20
No, again you're letting your smarmy quips block actual understanding.
The minute you find "evidence" of folk not making stuff up, the stuff becomes part of the correlation circle of epistemology, not ontology. Any answer thus evinced through something akin to scientific data, would be just the human-to-object relation. Again, read the quote again, this time carefully:
That part is nothing to do with metaphysics, just pointing to the circularity of correlationism and the ontological reification of human experience as "experience" projected to the universe.
That quote is appalling. At least I put some effort into my "smarmy quips".
Why is the quote appalling? Again, dodge-quip.
Otherwise, it just looks like you are a dealer in obscurity.
WTF?
Correlationism is the idea that you cannot get beyond the human mind's constructs of the world
I explained it myself here:
Quoting schopenhauer1
Quoting schopenhauer1
Don't take your point of view as THE point of view of the universe. By expecting an explanation of consciousness that comports to something like a human (e.g. scientific) point of view, would be barking up the wrong tree, as that is still part of the human-to-object way of relating to the world. It doesn't break that correlation of human mind/world.
Quoting schopenhauer1
And, as noted previously, that's just a muddle. Not because it's wrong, but because it sets out the issue improperly.
You live "beyond the human mind's constructs of the world". You are always, already, embedded in the world. Stop pretending you need an explanation before you engage.
Being already embedded, and recognizing that being embedded doesn't mean the universe is only how a human is embedded. There can be relations of things beyond how we construct the world. That is all that is required. There is are relations of objects or processes beyond the human-to-object relation.