Pansychism; a supporting essay (Introduction)

by David Turell , Sunday, May 17, 2020, 21:59 (1651 days ago) @ David Turell

A new one:

http://nautil.us//blog/electrons-may-very-well-be-conscious?mc_cid=646f0c04bd&mc_ei...

"This month, the cover of New Scientist ran the headline, “Is the Universe Conscious?” Mathematician and physicist Johannes Kleiner, at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy in Germany, told author Michael Brooks that a mathematically precise definition of consciousness could mean that the cosmos is suffused with subjective experience. “This could be the beginning of a scientific revolution,” Kleiner said, referring to research he and others have been conducting.

"Kleiner and his colleagues are focused on the Integrated Information Theory of consciousness, one of the more prominent theories of consciousness today. As Kleiner notes, IIT (as the theory is known) is thoroughly panpsychist because all integrated information has at least one bit of consciousness.

***

"While there are many versions of panpsychism, the version I find appealing is known as constitutive panpsychism. It states, to put it simply, that all matter has some associated mind or consciousness, and vice versa. Where there is mind there is matter and where there is matter there is mind. They go together. As modern panpsychists like Alfred North Whitehead, David Ray Griffin, Galen Strawson, and others have argued, all matter has some capacity for feeling, albeit highly rudimentary feeling in most configurations of matter.

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"Many biologists and philosophers have recognized that there is no hard line between animate and inanimate. J.B.S. Haldane, the eminent British biologist, supported the view that there is no clear demarcation line between what is alive and what is not: “We do not find obvious evidence of life or mind in so-called inert matter…; but if the scientific point of view is correct, we shall ultimately find them, at least in rudimentary form, all through the universe.”

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"More recently, University of Colorado astrobiologist Bruce Jakosky, who has worked with NASA in the search for extraterrestrial life, asked rhetorically: “Was there a distinct moment when Earth went from having no life to having life, as if a switch were flipped? The answer is ‘probably not.’”

"Theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, author of the 2018 book Lost in Math, has taken a contrary position. “f you want a particle to be conscious, your minimum expectation should be that the particle can change,” she argued in a post titled “Electrons Don’t Think.” “It’s hard to have an inner life with only one thought. But if electrons could have thoughts, we’d long have seen this in particle collisions because it would change the number of particles produced in collisions.”

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"Whitehead’s variety of panpsychism, still the most worked-out version of panpsychism today, re-envisions the nature of matter in a fundamental way. For Whitehead, all actual entities, including electrons, atoms, and molecules, are “drops of experience” in that they enjoy at least a little bit of experience, a little bit of awareness. At first blush it’s a strange perspective but eventually makes a great deal of sense.

"Rather than being unchanging things moving around in a container of space-time—the modern view in a nutshell—Whitehead conceives of particles like electrons as a chain of successive iterations of a single electron that bear a strong likeness to each other in each iteration, but are not identical to each other. Each iteration is a little different than the last. There is no static and unchanging electron. The degree to which each iteration is more or less different than the last iteration is the place for an iota of choice, and mind. This iota of choice compounds upwards and, through the course of biological evolution, results in the complex types of mind and choice that we humans and other mammals enjoy.

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"Many modern thinkers have come to embrace Whitehead and panpsychism to varying degrees, including Bohm, whose Wholeness and the Implicate Order, his magnum opus on modern physics and the nature of reality, refers to Whitehead as an inspiration.

"I am fleshing out in my work how we can turn these “merely” philosophical considerations about the nature of mind throughout nature into a testable set of experiments, with some early thoughts sketched here. Such experiments move debates about panpsychism out of the realm of philosophy and more firmly into the realm of science."

Comment: I find all of this a stretch, so I'm with Hossenfelder, but since I believe our universe is in the mind of God, some aspects of panpsychism reflect that thought. But much of what is discussed here is reactive behavior, automatic responses to stimuli.