Not super interested in arguments from incredulity.
That was an argument from the current absence of any way of answering these questions. It is not that the hypothesis is absurd, but that it is useless. As I said before, panpsychism merely utters the word “conscious” when pointing to everything.
Note that I am not aware of any competitor in the market place of ideas that offers any way forward at all.
You can do experiments on people to investigate how consciousness is affected by various interventions. Drugs, TMS, brain imaging, etc. There’s lots of this.
Here’s a rock. It’s on my bookshelves. How does panpsychism suggest I investigate the soul that it claims it to have?
It is not that the hypothesis is absurd, but that it is useless
All philosophical concepts are in a sense useless except insofar as they can limit what you attempt to do, rather than open new avenues for investigation. Panpsychism limits the possibility of investigating the ultimate nature of mind in the same sense that materialism limits the possiblity of investigating the ultimate nature of matter—given that everything is made of mass-energy, you could never disconfirm “X is composed of mass-energy”. Materialism is quite useless, in the same way as Panpsychism.
You keep saying panpsychism is useless, and I keep saying it’s not. Do you understand why I am saying that? I am not proposing we ask a rock. I am proposing we ask a human, and try to reverse engineer from a human’s self report. That is very very hard, but not in principle impossible.
. How does panpsychism suggest I investigate the soul that it claims it to have?
Panpsychism of the kind I am talking about does not make claims about souls, it makes claims about “consciousness as a primitive in physics.” Adding primitives when forced to has a long history in science/math.
Panpsychism of the kind I am talking about does not make claims about souls, it makes claims about “consciousness as a primitive in physics.” Adding primitives when forced to has a long history in science/math.
I was just using “soul” to avoid typing out “consciousness” all the time. But perhaps we are talking at cross purposes? My understanding of the word “panpsychism” is the doctrine that everything (“pan-”) has whatever-you-want-to-call-it (“-psych-”), and from the etymology, dictionaries, philosophical encyclopedias, and the internet generally, that is how the word is universally used and understood.
“Consciousness as a primitive” is independent of that doctrine, and needs a different name. “Psychism”? (Materialists will call it “magic”, but that’s a statement of disagreement with the doctrine, rather than a name for it.)
Chalmers here begins, “Panpsychism, taken literally, is the doctrine that everything has a mind”, which agrees with the general use. Then he redefines the word to mean “the thesis that some fundamental physical entities have mental states”.
His “taken literally” qualification implies that the universal quantification of the “pan-” prefix is usually limited in some unspecified way, making his redefinition seem less of a break, but I do not think that the SEP article on panpsychism supports a limitation as drastic as the one he is making. His “some” could accommodate consciousness being present only in humans; no historical use of “panpsychism” in the SEP article can.
So you did not misunderstand Chalmers, but Chalmers would better have picked a different word. I think “psychism” fits the bill.
If some entities have a soul and others do not, there remains the same question as for the materialistic doctrine: why these and not those, and how does it work? We then get “emergent psychism”, where what emerges from unensouled matter is not the right configuration to be a soul, but the right configuration to have a soul. And if answers to these questions are found, we end up with materialist psychism, with an expanded set of materials. At which point materialist philosophers can point out that this was materialism all along.
Yup. Still useful (just very very hard).
Not super interested in arguments from incredulity.
Note that I am not aware of any competitor in the market place of ideas that offers any way forward at all.
That was an argument from the current absence of any way of answering these questions. It is not that the hypothesis is absurd, but that it is useless. As I said before, panpsychism merely utters the word “conscious” when pointing to everything.
You can do experiments on people to investigate how consciousness is affected by various interventions. Drugs, TMS, brain imaging, etc. There’s lots of this.
Here’s a rock. It’s on my bookshelves. How does panpsychism suggest I investigate the soul that it claims it to have?
All philosophical concepts are in a sense useless except insofar as they can limit what you attempt to do, rather than open new avenues for investigation. Panpsychism limits the possibility of investigating the ultimate nature of mind in the same sense that materialism limits the possiblity of investigating the ultimate nature of matter—given that everything is made of mass-energy, you could never disconfirm “X is composed of mass-energy”. Materialism is quite useless, in the same way as Panpsychism.
You keep saying panpsychism is useless, and I keep saying it’s not. Do you understand why I am saying that? I am not proposing we ask a rock. I am proposing we ask a human, and try to reverse engineer from a human’s self report. That is very very hard, but not in principle impossible.
Panpsychism of the kind I am talking about does not make claims about souls, it makes claims about “consciousness as a primitive in physics.” Adding primitives when forced to has a long history in science/math.
I was just using “soul” to avoid typing out “consciousness” all the time. But perhaps we are talking at cross purposes? My understanding of the word “panpsychism” is the doctrine that everything (“pan-”) has whatever-you-want-to-call-it (“-psych-”), and from the etymology, dictionaries, philosophical encyclopedias, and the internet generally, that is how the word is universally used and understood.
“Consciousness as a primitive” is independent of that doctrine, and needs a different name. “Psychism”? (Materialists will call it “magic”, but that’s a statement of disagreement with the doctrine, rather than a name for it.)
I was just going by my understanding of what Chalmers calls panpsychism. Did I misunderstand Chalmers?
Chalmers here begins, “Panpsychism, taken literally, is the doctrine that everything has a mind”, which agrees with the general use. Then he redefines the word to mean “the thesis that some fundamental physical entities have mental states”.
His “taken literally” qualification implies that the universal quantification of the “pan-” prefix is usually limited in some unspecified way, making his redefinition seem less of a break, but I do not think that the SEP article on panpsychism supports a limitation as drastic as the one he is making. His “some” could accommodate consciousness being present only in humans; no historical use of “panpsychism” in the SEP article can.
So you did not misunderstand Chalmers, but Chalmers would better have picked a different word. I think “psychism” fits the bill.
If some entities have a soul and others do not, there remains the same question as for the materialistic doctrine: why these and not those, and how does it work? We then get “emergent psychism”, where what emerges from unensouled matter is not the right configuration to be a soul, but the right configuration to have a soul. And if answers to these questions are found, we end up with materialist psychism, with an expanded set of materials. At which point materialist philosophers can point out that this was materialism all along.