I think panpsychism is outrageously false, and profoundly misguided as an approach to the hard problem.
What do you think of Brian Tomasik’s flavor of panpsychism, which he says is compatible with (and, indeed, follows from) type-A materialism? As he puts it,
It’s unsurprising that a type-A physicalist should attribute nonzero consciousness to all systems. After all, “consciousness” is a concept—a “cluster in thingspace”—and all points in thingspace are less than infinitely far away from the centroid of the “consciousness” cluster. By a similar argument, we might say that any system displays nonzero similarity to any concept (except maybe for strictly partitioned concepts that map onto the universe’s fundamental ontology, like the difference between matter vs. antimatter). Panpsychism on consciousness is just one particular example of that principle.
I haven’t read Brian Tomasik’s thoughts on this, so let me know if you think I’m misunderstanding him / should read more.
The hard problem of consciousness at least gives us a prima facie reason to consider panpsychism. (Though I think this ultimately falls apart when we consider ‘we couldn’t know about the hard problem of consciousness if non-interactionist panpsychism were true; and interactionist panpsychism would mean new, detectable physics’.)
If we deny the hard problem, then I don’t see any reason to give panpsychism any consideration in the first place. We could distinguish two panpsychist views here: ‘trivial’ (doesn’t have any practical implications, just amounts to defining ‘consciousness’ so broadly as to include anything and everything); and ‘nontrivial’ (has practical implications, or at least the potential for such; e.g., perhaps the revelation that panpsychism is true should cause us to treat electrons as moral patients, with their own rights and/or their own welfare).
But I see no reason whatsoever to think that electrons are moral patients, or that electrons have any other nontrivial mental property. The mere fact that we don’t fully understand how human brains work is not a reason to ask whether there’s some new undiscovered feature of particles ∼1031 times smaller than a human brain that explains the comically larger macro-process—any more than limitations in our understanding of stomachs would be a reason to ask whether individual electrons have some hidden digestive properties.
(Brian Tomasik’s view superficially sounds a lot like what Ben Weinstein-Raun is criticizing in his second paragraph, so I thought I’d add here the comment I wrote in response to Ben’s post:
> Panhousism isn’t exactly wrong, but it’s not actually very enlightening. It doesn’t explain how the houseyness of a tree is increased when you rearrange the tree to be a log cabin. In fact it might naively want to deny that the total houseyness is increased.
I really don’t see how that is what panhousism would say, at least what I have in mind when I think of panhousism (which is analogous to what I have in mind when I think of (type-A materialist[1]) panpsychism). If all that panhousism means is that (1) “house” is a cluster in thingspace and (2) nothing is infinitely far away from the centroid of the “house” cluster, then it seems very obvious to me that the distance of a tree from the “house” centroid decreases if you rearrange the tree into a log cabin. As an example, focus on the “suitability to protect humans from rain” dimension in thingspace. It’s very clear to me that turning a tree into a log cabin moves it closer to the “house” cluster in that dimension. And the same principle applies to all other dimensions. So I don’t see your point here.
I’m not sure if I should quote Ben’s reply to me, since his post is not public, but he pretty much said that his original post was not addressing type-A physicalist panpsychism, although he finds this view unuseful for other reasons.
Thanks for sharing. :) Yeah, it seems like most people have in mind type-F monism when they refer to panpsychism, since that’s the kind of panpsychism that’s growing in popularity in philosophy in recent years. I agree with Rob’s reasons for rejecting that view.
What do you think of Brian Tomasik’s flavor of panpsychism, which he says is compatible with (and, indeed, follows from) type-A materialism? As he puts it,
I haven’t read Brian Tomasik’s thoughts on this, so let me know if you think I’m misunderstanding him / should read more.
The hard problem of consciousness at least gives us a prima facie reason to consider panpsychism. (Though I think this ultimately falls apart when we consider ‘we couldn’t know about the hard problem of consciousness if non-interactionist panpsychism were true; and interactionist panpsychism would mean new, detectable physics’.)
If we deny the hard problem, then I don’t see any reason to give panpsychism any consideration in the first place. We could distinguish two panpsychist views here: ‘trivial’ (doesn’t have any practical implications, just amounts to defining ‘consciousness’ so broadly as to include anything and everything); and ‘nontrivial’ (has practical implications, or at least the potential for such; e.g., perhaps the revelation that panpsychism is true should cause us to treat electrons as moral patients, with their own rights and/or their own welfare).
But I see no reason whatsoever to think that electrons are moral patients, or that electrons have any other nontrivial mental property. The mere fact that we don’t fully understand how human brains work is not a reason to ask whether there’s some new undiscovered feature of particles ∼1031 times smaller than a human brain that explains the comically larger macro-process—any more than limitations in our understanding of stomachs would be a reason to ask whether individual electrons have some hidden digestive properties.
(Brian Tomasik’s view superficially sounds a lot like what Ben Weinstein-Raun is criticizing in his second paragraph, so I thought I’d add here the comment I wrote in response to Ben’s post:
I’m not sure if I should quote Ben’s reply to me, since his post is not public, but he pretty much said that his original post was not addressing type-A physicalist panpsychism, although he finds this view unuseful for other reasons.
)
Thanks for sharing. :) Yeah, it seems like most people have in mind type-F monism when they refer to panpsychism, since that’s the kind of panpsychism that’s growing in popularity in philosophy in recent years. I agree with Rob’s reasons for rejecting that view.