Panpsychism sounds very similar to pantheism which of course has been around awhile. It seems these folks are splitting hairs over something that, at least at the present, is speculative and unprovable in any meaningful sense. I get the impression these folks have too much free time on their hands, and probably too much $ in the bank so as to afford the luxury of sitting around and arguing about such issues. Man cannot live by bread alone, but geez, the price of eggs!
As a pantheist that rejects panpsychism, I think you're making a false equivalence. Pantheism redefines god in a way that makes naturalistic theology possible by removing the need for the supernatural. It does not suggest that god is a property of matter; instead, god is all matter viewed holistically. Panpsychism posits an effectively supernatural element of "consciousness" as a property of matter, since it cannot be detected or measured. Pantheism removes the need for supernatural explanations, panpsychism IS a supernatural explanation.
The pantheistic definition of god just puts spirituality into a materialist frame instead of a supernatural one. This allows you to interface with scripture, ritual, and other spiritual traditions without adopting literal interpretations that require faith to be effective. The concept of god also helps you see the universe as fundamentally good, which promotes hope and optimism. There are plenty of great use cases for god even if you don't define it supernaturally.
It isn’t God if it doesn’t transcend the material world. You’re just throwing glitter over the world and trying to enchant it, but really you have a materialist worldview. Which is in my approximations, deluded and evil. There is nothing spiritual about infections, rape, sodomy or something like warfare. Panentheism and Transtheism seem to be obviously preferable as alternatives. I don’t think the supernatural requires faith as you can have immersion into the transcendent through contemplative practices such as Jhana. “God” in this rendering is totally nominative and neutered, this “God” cant save you, cant love you, you cant abide in it to escape or circumvent suffering as an ultimate soteriological goal, whats the point?
There is a deep irony in the question, "Is Consciousness Fundamental?" The answer, it turns out, is not actually "yes," because we are exhorted to always keep matter as the fundamental thing. But since consciousness is obviously somehow there, maybe matter = consciousness? It doesn't make sense, but it's the only way not to violate the standard dogma of modern rationalists.
Wow! I read this article twice and my grey matter is still hurting. While I enjoyed Matt’s reasoning and logic, it was still too scholarly for my mind (no pun intended)
The avoidance of top-down causality makes building an account of consciousness impossible. Combination is the one and the many in different words too-how can diverse subjects be apprehended as a unity if they “start” as diverse? Of course the reverse “decombination problem” has also been suggested for a mirror image style of reductionism-how can a single subject meaningfully “break up” into diverse subjects with real distinctions?
The only solution I see is to not place diversity nor unity as metaphysically prior, but instead as co-equal. Something something identity of identity and difference vague gesture something something.
Indeed. How would Annaka, for example, explain something like multiple personality disorder? As far as we know, it *only* occurs through top-down causality, usually through extreme trauma or emotional distress. How would she tackle this? Some sort of bottom-up mishap or secondary (or even 3 or 4) 'illusions' to handwave it away?
How would she dismiss the placebo effect?
How would she engage w/ near-death experiences or psychedelic trips?
Panpsychism, broadly speaking, is another attempt (like property dualism) to somehow read consciousness into physical matter (indeed, some panpsychists largely see their view either as a form, or an updated version, of property dualism). What's interesting about this is that, to the extent it succeeds, it completely undermines physicalism, since if consciousness is essential to what matter is, matter isn't really "matter", in the sense we have used that term for the last few centuries in the west—as a purely quantitative entity in spacetime. If qualitative phenomena are baked into matter at its most metaphysically fundamental, then we are really talking about a form of idealism, anyway.
This basic slippage is compounded by many thinkers—certainly including the Harrises—in confusing the contents of consciousness with the condition of possibility of consciousness. The standard argument among those who deny "the self" is to point out that there is no stable object within consciousness that can be the self: what we experience is always changing, and even those things which seem most stable (such as important memories, opinions, etc.) are very mutable. We know that a head injury can erase much of our empirical identity. In that sense, of course, criticism of a naive sense of self is absolutely correct.
But when many philosophers—and certainly those in the Neoplatonist, Phenomenological, and Vedantin traditions—speak of Self, this is very much *not* what they are referring to. This is perhaps clearest in the Vedantin doctrine of the atman. "Atman" is often translated into English as "self", but it has nothing to do with what Husserlian phenomenology would call the "empirical ego"—that set of memories, opinions, preferences, habits, abilities, etc. that constitute our social human identity. Instead, atman refers to the bare ground of consciousness, the condition of possibility of any conscious experience, pure subjectivity as such, pure spirit as such—indeed, many Vedantin philosophers refer to the atman as the "witness consciousness"—it watches, but does not act. (One might compare this, to some extent, to the Kantian/Husserlian idea of the transcendental ego.)
The empirical ego is a collection of phenomena within consciousness; the atman is the reality that allows for any phenomena to appear at all. They are metaphysically, conceptually, and phenomenologically distinct. One might as well confuse the Atlantic Ocean for the chemical relationship of dihydrogen oxide. The latter makes the former possible; it is in no way contained by or contingent upon the former.
This also means, of course, that the self has no objective dimension at all: it is pure subjectivity as such, and does not appear as an object to consciousness at all. It is a present absence, the present absence of phenomenality (the theological comparison here will be obvious to many). For the most part, English-language analytic philosophy is blind to this understanding precisely because that tradition of philosophy assumes that truth is a series of propositions about various substances or objects. But the self is pre-substantial; it lies under, beneath, beyond, and within every conceptual object—they depend on it; it does not depend on them.
So, I say: the self is dead! Long live the Self! And let's hope English-language philosophers, especially those trained in the analytic tradition, can broaden their scope enough to engage more fully with philosophy at its best.
I agree with most of your criticisms. She has basically given up on being a neuroscientist. The position is entirely without merit at every single step. This strikes me as explanatory laziness and nothing else.
Why assume that we have to choose between materialism, idealism, or panpsychism as they’re currently framed? What if the truth lies in a territory beyond all of them—-a domain or dimension so different from our conceptual frameworks that none of our prevailing "isms" can quite reach it?
One thing that stands out in many discussions of panpsychism (especially critiques) is the confidence that our present language and categories are up to the task. Take the “combination problem,” for instance: it reflects an implicit faith that we understand mind and matter well enough to question how it could be that little minds add up to big ones. But what if both “mind” and “matter” are placeholders for something deeper we don’t yet have the tools to grasp?
This seems like a good time to recall the Flatlanders and their baffled attempts to make sense of a sphere passing through their two-dimensional world. As Thomas Nagel has argued, our craving for cognitive closure, paired with the limits of our language and conceptual apparatus, may be precisely what keeps us from apprehending how things really are.
Rather than forcing new ideas into old containers, maybe we need to accept the discomfort of not knowing-- and take seriously the possibility that the world is stranger, subtler, and more dimensionally complex than any of our current metaphysical models allow.
While this appeals to a certain sense of humility, the problem here is that you can *always* say that. You can always appeal to "well maybe it's just beyond human knowing" and/or "maybe we're just too stupid to figure it out".
And while I understand, to some degree, the impulse behind that, I would respectfully submit it's also a lazy approach. It sounds to me like an excuse to stop trying and basically just live and let live.
Well, also underappreciated by panpsychists (and I speak for a former version of myself) is a very real problem of (and pardon my awkward phrasing) causal over/underdetermination.
If you have mental properties inherent in matter at all levels, what is doing the causal work at each level? We seem to have desires, beliefs, etc. We *tend* to think of those as being the causes of our behaviour. At the very least, our behaviour is unintelligible if not driven by mental-kinds. A rock rolling down a hill, however, doesn't require any appeal to mental kinds as causes and its behaviour is perfectly understandable outside of such appeals. But both mental properties and physical properties are supposed to be present (and fundamentally so) at all levels of reality. So what are the mental properties doing in the rolling-rock? And when, how, and why do we see the shift from physical-causal sufficiency to mental-causal sufficiency? There's no good answer here.
Panpsychism does bring mental kinds back into the picture (so it's better than dumb-dumb materialism) but it doesn't really solve problems.
I don’t know what the big stink around panpsychism is these days: it merely riffs on ideas that have been around for thousands of years in similar forms. Hinduism, certain branches of Buddhism, Taoism, the animisms of Indigenous cultures… If anything, we should be angry at pansychism for stealing, not for its philosophical inconsistencies.
But like it or not, humans will always strive to believe in something greater than themselves; it’s baked into our being such that our “souls” may persist. Even those who come to terms with death and suffering in their lifetime, I imagine, truly don’t fully accept oblivion. I think it’s hardwired into us to want something more, whether or not it ends up being true or not.
woah you cant just ignore sentience, the reality of time being now, this writer is missing this critical aspect to the theory..
yes you are not your thoughts, the real you is what notices your thoughts, this is what you discover in meditation. but we are rocks and water come to life. the material universe self aware.
hes thinking the philosophical zombie disproves idealism, when there is a real being in that zombie
Panpsychism sounds very similar to pantheism which of course has been around awhile. It seems these folks are splitting hairs over something that, at least at the present, is speculative and unprovable in any meaningful sense. I get the impression these folks have too much free time on their hands, and probably too much $ in the bank so as to afford the luxury of sitting around and arguing about such issues. Man cannot live by bread alone, but geez, the price of eggs!
As a pantheist that rejects panpsychism, I think you're making a false equivalence. Pantheism redefines god in a way that makes naturalistic theology possible by removing the need for the supernatural. It does not suggest that god is a property of matter; instead, god is all matter viewed holistically. Panpsychism posits an effectively supernatural element of "consciousness" as a property of matter, since it cannot be detected or measured. Pantheism removes the need for supernatural explanations, panpsychism IS a supernatural explanation.
What a totally worthless outlook on things, why even it call it “God”?
The pantheistic definition of god just puts spirituality into a materialist frame instead of a supernatural one. This allows you to interface with scripture, ritual, and other spiritual traditions without adopting literal interpretations that require faith to be effective. The concept of god also helps you see the universe as fundamentally good, which promotes hope and optimism. There are plenty of great use cases for god even if you don't define it supernaturally.
It isn’t God if it doesn’t transcend the material world. You’re just throwing glitter over the world and trying to enchant it, but really you have a materialist worldview. Which is in my approximations, deluded and evil. There is nothing spiritual about infections, rape, sodomy or something like warfare. Panentheism and Transtheism seem to be obviously preferable as alternatives. I don’t think the supernatural requires faith as you can have immersion into the transcendent through contemplative practices such as Jhana. “God” in this rendering is totally nominative and neutered, this “God” cant save you, cant love you, you cant abide in it to escape or circumvent suffering as an ultimate soteriological goal, whats the point?
You're making a lot of assumptions about what a pantheistic concept of god can and cannot do here.
Then elaborate, as it seems to me that you limit the definition of God to the observable universe and its elemental constituents.
There is a deep irony in the question, "Is Consciousness Fundamental?" The answer, it turns out, is not actually "yes," because we are exhorted to always keep matter as the fundamental thing. But since consciousness is obviously somehow there, maybe matter = consciousness? It doesn't make sense, but it's the only way not to violate the standard dogma of modern rationalists.
Wow! I read this article twice and my grey matter is still hurting. While I enjoyed Matt’s reasoning and logic, it was still too scholarly for my mind (no pun intended)
The avoidance of top-down causality makes building an account of consciousness impossible. Combination is the one and the many in different words too-how can diverse subjects be apprehended as a unity if they “start” as diverse? Of course the reverse “decombination problem” has also been suggested for a mirror image style of reductionism-how can a single subject meaningfully “break up” into diverse subjects with real distinctions?
The only solution I see is to not place diversity nor unity as metaphysically prior, but instead as co-equal. Something something identity of identity and difference vague gesture something something.
Indeed. How would Annaka, for example, explain something like multiple personality disorder? As far as we know, it *only* occurs through top-down causality, usually through extreme trauma or emotional distress. How would she tackle this? Some sort of bottom-up mishap or secondary (or even 3 or 4) 'illusions' to handwave it away?
How would she dismiss the placebo effect?
How would she engage w/ near-death experiences or psychedelic trips?
I wonder how these people manage to consolidate both a deterministic view and this panpsychism idea. I don't think those two play well together.
Although I agree with a certain type of panpsychism, I also think Harris's explanation is too superficial.
Panpsychism, broadly speaking, is another attempt (like property dualism) to somehow read consciousness into physical matter (indeed, some panpsychists largely see their view either as a form, or an updated version, of property dualism). What's interesting about this is that, to the extent it succeeds, it completely undermines physicalism, since if consciousness is essential to what matter is, matter isn't really "matter", in the sense we have used that term for the last few centuries in the west—as a purely quantitative entity in spacetime. If qualitative phenomena are baked into matter at its most metaphysically fundamental, then we are really talking about a form of idealism, anyway.
This basic slippage is compounded by many thinkers—certainly including the Harrises—in confusing the contents of consciousness with the condition of possibility of consciousness. The standard argument among those who deny "the self" is to point out that there is no stable object within consciousness that can be the self: what we experience is always changing, and even those things which seem most stable (such as important memories, opinions, etc.) are very mutable. We know that a head injury can erase much of our empirical identity. In that sense, of course, criticism of a naive sense of self is absolutely correct.
But when many philosophers—and certainly those in the Neoplatonist, Phenomenological, and Vedantin traditions—speak of Self, this is very much *not* what they are referring to. This is perhaps clearest in the Vedantin doctrine of the atman. "Atman" is often translated into English as "self", but it has nothing to do with what Husserlian phenomenology would call the "empirical ego"—that set of memories, opinions, preferences, habits, abilities, etc. that constitute our social human identity. Instead, atman refers to the bare ground of consciousness, the condition of possibility of any conscious experience, pure subjectivity as such, pure spirit as such—indeed, many Vedantin philosophers refer to the atman as the "witness consciousness"—it watches, but does not act. (One might compare this, to some extent, to the Kantian/Husserlian idea of the transcendental ego.)
The empirical ego is a collection of phenomena within consciousness; the atman is the reality that allows for any phenomena to appear at all. They are metaphysically, conceptually, and phenomenologically distinct. One might as well confuse the Atlantic Ocean for the chemical relationship of dihydrogen oxide. The latter makes the former possible; it is in no way contained by or contingent upon the former.
This also means, of course, that the self has no objective dimension at all: it is pure subjectivity as such, and does not appear as an object to consciousness at all. It is a present absence, the present absence of phenomenality (the theological comparison here will be obvious to many). For the most part, English-language analytic philosophy is blind to this understanding precisely because that tradition of philosophy assumes that truth is a series of propositions about various substances or objects. But the self is pre-substantial; it lies under, beneath, beyond, and within every conceptual object—they depend on it; it does not depend on them.
So, I say: the self is dead! Long live the Self! And let's hope English-language philosophers, especially those trained in the analytic tradition, can broaden their scope enough to engage more fully with philosophy at its best.
Christian panpsychism is the real thing
I agree with most of your criticisms. She has basically given up on being a neuroscientist. The position is entirely without merit at every single step. This strikes me as explanatory laziness and nothing else.
Why assume that we have to choose between materialism, idealism, or panpsychism as they’re currently framed? What if the truth lies in a territory beyond all of them—-a domain or dimension so different from our conceptual frameworks that none of our prevailing "isms" can quite reach it?
One thing that stands out in many discussions of panpsychism (especially critiques) is the confidence that our present language and categories are up to the task. Take the “combination problem,” for instance: it reflects an implicit faith that we understand mind and matter well enough to question how it could be that little minds add up to big ones. But what if both “mind” and “matter” are placeholders for something deeper we don’t yet have the tools to grasp?
This seems like a good time to recall the Flatlanders and their baffled attempts to make sense of a sphere passing through their two-dimensional world. As Thomas Nagel has argued, our craving for cognitive closure, paired with the limits of our language and conceptual apparatus, may be precisely what keeps us from apprehending how things really are.
Rather than forcing new ideas into old containers, maybe we need to accept the discomfort of not knowing-- and take seriously the possibility that the world is stranger, subtler, and more dimensionally complex than any of our current metaphysical models allow.
While this appeals to a certain sense of humility, the problem here is that you can *always* say that. You can always appeal to "well maybe it's just beyond human knowing" and/or "maybe we're just too stupid to figure it out".
And while I understand, to some degree, the impulse behind that, I would respectfully submit it's also a lazy approach. It sounds to me like an excuse to stop trying and basically just live and let live.
Well, also underappreciated by panpsychists (and I speak for a former version of myself) is a very real problem of (and pardon my awkward phrasing) causal over/underdetermination.
If you have mental properties inherent in matter at all levels, what is doing the causal work at each level? We seem to have desires, beliefs, etc. We *tend* to think of those as being the causes of our behaviour. At the very least, our behaviour is unintelligible if not driven by mental-kinds. A rock rolling down a hill, however, doesn't require any appeal to mental kinds as causes and its behaviour is perfectly understandable outside of such appeals. But both mental properties and physical properties are supposed to be present (and fundamentally so) at all levels of reality. So what are the mental properties doing in the rolling-rock? And when, how, and why do we see the shift from physical-causal sufficiency to mental-causal sufficiency? There's no good answer here.
Panpsychism does bring mental kinds back into the picture (so it's better than dumb-dumb materialism) but it doesn't really solve problems.
I don’t know what the big stink around panpsychism is these days: it merely riffs on ideas that have been around for thousands of years in similar forms. Hinduism, certain branches of Buddhism, Taoism, the animisms of Indigenous cultures… If anything, we should be angry at pansychism for stealing, not for its philosophical inconsistencies.
But like it or not, humans will always strive to believe in something greater than themselves; it’s baked into our being such that our “souls” may persist. Even those who come to terms with death and suffering in their lifetime, I imagine, truly don’t fully accept oblivion. I think it’s hardwired into us to want something more, whether or not it ends up being true or not.
woah you cant just ignore sentience, the reality of time being now, this writer is missing this critical aspect to the theory..
yes you are not your thoughts, the real you is what notices your thoughts, this is what you discover in meditation. but we are rocks and water come to life. the material universe self aware.
hes thinking the philosophical zombie disproves idealism, when there is a real being in that zombie
wut