I don’t get why it’s still not mainstream that panpsychism with weak illusionism about “self” solves the Hard Problem.
In the sense that shooting someone and also cutting off their head kills them. It’s not clear why would need both … and there are good arguments against each.
What is hard about the hard problem is the requirement to explain consciousness, particularly conscious experience, in terms of a physical ontology. Its the combination of the two that makes it hard. Which is to say that the problem can be sidestepped by either denying consciousness, or adopting a non-physicalist ontology.
Examples of non-physical ontologies include dualism, panpsychism and idealism . These are not faced with the Hard Problem, as such, because they are able to say that subjective, qualia, just are what they are, without facing any need to offer a reductive explanation of them. But they have problems of their own, mainly that physicalism is so succedsful in other areas.
Eliminative materialism and illusionism, on the other hand, deny that there is anything to be explained, thereby implying there is no problem, But these approaches also remain unsatisfactory because of the compelling subjective evidence for consciousness.
Well, the trick is that panpsychism is physicalist in broad sense, as they say. After all it’s not like physicalist deny the concept of existence, and saying that the thing, that is different between us and zombies, that we call “consciousness”, is actually that thing that physicalist call “reality” does not make it unphysical and doesn’t prevent physicalism from working where it worked before. It’s all definitional anyway—if panpsychism solves everything, then it doesn’t matter whether it is physicalist or not.
If you make “physical” broad enough, it ceases to mean anything, and everything is compatible with it. That’s not a just a problem for panpsychism: physicalists are often in the position of fervently defending something they can only vaguely define. But if you try to make physicalism precise, it turns out that the concept of reductionism is the one doing the work: the idea that the only fundamental properties are physical ones, and all higher level properties must be explicable in terms of lower level ones.
if panpsychism solves everything, then it doesn’t matter whether it is physicalist or not.
Matters to whom? There’s no shortage of people who would rather leave cosnsciosuness unexplained (or illusory or non existent) than abandon physicalism.
In the sense that shooting someone and also cutting off their head kills them. It’s not clear why would need both … and there are good arguments against each.
What is hard about the hard problem is the requirement to explain consciousness, particularly conscious experience, in terms of a physical ontology. Its the combination of the two that makes it hard. Which is to say that the problem can be sidestepped by either denying consciousness, or adopting a non-physicalist ontology.
Examples of non-physical ontologies include dualism, panpsychism and idealism . These are not faced with the Hard Problem, as such, because they are able to say that subjective, qualia, just are what they are, without facing any need to offer a reductive explanation of them. But they have problems of their own, mainly that physicalism is so succedsful in other areas.
Eliminative materialism and illusionism, on the other hand, deny that there is anything to be explained, thereby implying there is no problem, But these approaches also remain unsatisfactory because of the compelling subjective evidence for consciousness.
Well, the trick is that panpsychism is physicalist in broad sense, as they say. After all it’s not like physicalist deny the concept of existence, and saying that the thing, that is different between us and zombies, that we call “consciousness”, is actually that thing that physicalist call “reality” does not make it unphysical and doesn’t prevent physicalism from working where it worked before. It’s all definitional anyway—if panpsychism solves everything, then it doesn’t matter whether it is physicalist or not.
If you make “physical” broad enough, it ceases to mean anything, and everything is compatible with it. That’s not a just a problem for panpsychism: physicalists are often in the position of fervently defending something they can only vaguely define. But if you try to make physicalism precise, it turns out that the concept of reductionism is the one doing the work: the idea that the only fundamental properties are physical ones, and all higher level properties must be explicable in terms of lower level ones.
Matters to whom? There’s no shortage of people who would rather leave cosnsciosuness unexplained (or illusory or non existent) than abandon physicalism.