Panpsychism Makes a Comeback: (General)

by David Turell , Saturday, April 02, 2022, 17:09 (756 days ago) @ dhw

A claim we must add mind to science:

https://mindmatters.ai/2022/04/new-scientist-offers-a-sympathetic-account-of-panpsychism/

"Thomas Lewton tells us about his own journey at his site: “Studying physics, I thought telescopes and particle colliders would offer firm answers, but instead they raised more questions.”

"It can seem as if there is an insurmountable gap between our subjective experience of the world and our attempts to objectively describe it. And yet our brains are made of matter – so, you might think, the states of mind they generate must be explicable in terms of states of matter. The question is: how? And if we can’t explain consciousness in physical terms, how do we find a place for it in an all-embracing view of the universe?

"It can seem as if there is an insurmountable gap between our subjective experience of the world and our attempts to objectively describe it. And yet our brains are made of matter – so, you might think, the states of mind they generate must be explicable in terms of states of matter. The question is: how? And if we can’t explain consciousness in physical terms, how do we find a place for it in an all-embracing view of the universe?

"That’s an admirably blunt statement of the central problem, the failure of physicalism, the view that the mind is merely what the brain does. That, as philosopher David Papineau puts it, consciousness is just “brain processes that feel like something.”

"A surprising number of physicists are rethinking all that, “convinced that we will never make sense of the universe’s mysteries – things like how reality emerges from the fog of the quantum world and what the passage of time truly signifies – unless we reimagine the relationship between matter and mind.” Which, they realize, can’t be done simply by eliminating the mind from science thinking.

"Lewton sounds prepared to deal: “Modern physics was founded on the separation of mind and matter.” Indeed, it was. And if that doesn’t work, materialism is dead. His approach is shorn of the “any minute now, science will explain… ” that characterizes so much popular science writing in this area.

***

"Philip Goff explains, “The irony is that physicalism has done so well and explained so much precisely because it was designed to exclude consciousness.” But excluding something in principle does not cause it to cease to exist.

"However, what if…

"One option is to suggest that some form of consciousness, however fragmentary, is an intrinsic property of matter. At a fundamental level, this micro-consciousness is all that exists. The idea, known as panpsychism, rips up the physicalist handbook to offer a simple solution to the hard problem of consciousness, says Goff, by plugging the gap between our inner experiences and our objective, scientific descriptions of the world. If everything is to some extent conscious, we no longer have to account for our experience in terms of non-conscious components.

"So panpsychism is an effort to rescue naturalism (the view that nature is all there is, often called “materialism”) by including the mind in nature rather than attempting to disprove its existence.

***

"Fundamentally, the scientists Lewton writes about acknowledge that neuroscience does not smooth everything over by explaining how or why the brain produces conscious experiences. And naturalism cannot indefinitely get away with “just around the corner” talk (promissory materialism).

"If efforts to rid science of the human mind are widely seen to be failing, the world will hardly be the poorer. But panpsychism takes science into unknown territory. We must wait to see what unfolds."

Comment: it is much easier to accept that design is obviously present in our reality. Only a mind can design. Therefore mind is at work in our reality. The struggle is the fight to save pure materialism. The struggle is obviously illogically foolish.