Panpsychism is the view that "everything has a mind." In this video, I look at arguments for and against this view
NOTES
- panpsychism- “everything has a mind”
- Not that everything can think, but everything has some level of consciousness
- Not necessarily that every single object has consciousness, but at least the building blocks
- A1: Problem of Psychophysical Emergence
- A2: The Intrinsic Nature Argument
- Physical objects are known by their extrinsic nature
- This doesn't tell us about the intrinsic nature of these objects
- Science can only tell us about the extrinsic nature of physical objects
- So, science is an incomplete picture of the world
- Panpsychist has a proposal: the intrinsic nature of matter is, at least in part, consciousness
- A3: “simplicity argument” in favor of panpsychism
- The intrinsic nature of at least some matter is consciousness-involving: namely the matter of brains
- This is perhaps our only real clue as to the intrinsic nature of matter in general
- O1: hasty generalization
- O1: Deeply counterintuitive
- O2: The Combination Problem
- James: Very difficult to make sense of: “little” conscious subjects of experience with their micro-experiences coming together to form a “big” conscious subject with its own experiences
- Imagine there are a billion conscious particles
- Push them all together into a brain shape
- A human consciousness arises
- That human consciousness would not be a case of additive emergence like the quiet voices making a loud sound
- It would just be an entirely new consciousness
- You'd now have 1 billion and 1 consciousnesses
- In general, a mind isn't something you add up to
- The Subject-Summing Problem
- 1. Each subject has a viewpoint that excludes the viewpoints of all other subjects
- 2. If my point of view and your point of view were to be combined into an “uber-mind”, then that uber-mind would have to have both your experiences to the exclusion of all other experiences and my experiences to the exclusion of all other experiences
- 3. This seems flatly contradictory
- Adapted zombie argument
- Assume: conceivability = possibility
- We can conceive of a human with all its parts being conscious, yet the human not conscious itself
- So, it's possible for the parts to be conscious without the self being conscious
- If the parts can be conscious without giving rise to the self being conscious, then something else must be causing the self to be conscious
- So, panpsychism is false
- James: Very difficult to make sense of: “little” conscious subjects of experience with their micro-experiences coming together to form a “big” conscious subject with its own experiences
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