I recently came across a review that Luke Roelofs, a professor teaching at the University of Texas at Arlington, wrote back in 2018 of a then new book on panpsychism. Roelefs' own comments on panpsychism here are not limited to evaluating the merits of the book, and in what follows I will avoid unnecessary explanations by omitting any naming of the book itself. Roelef says that there is a distinction, important but seldom made, between one sort of panpsychism, as old as philosophy itself, and another, specific to recent discussions that arise within the Anglophonic analytic tradition. One natural way to define panpsychism is to call it the view that the fundamental properties of the physical world are themselves conscious. This, as Roelef said, looks like a claim about the where, not the what or the how of consciousness. The proper rivals of panpsychism, were it limited to the view defined in italics above, would be other views about where. A "neologism-happy philosopher...
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I hope I have made clear to regular readers of this humble mind that I am not a believer in panpsychism. My own view of the mind-body relation, on the other hand, is a form of emergentism, which ends up in a place quite similar to old-fashioned mind-body dualism and interactionism. But I did find of interest a recent paper's breakdown of the three broad arguments for panpsychism: the continuity argument, the Hegelian argument, and the Agnostic argument. In brief that means: 1) Continuity. All matter must have some element of mind in it because otherwise there would be a radical and incomprehensible discontinuity in the history of matter in the world. 2) Hegelian. Panpsychism offers a sort of dialectical synthesis between materialism and dualism with the upside of each and the downside of neither. 3) Agnostic. No idea of the intrinsically non-experiential [something neither mental nor proto-mental] could even be intelligible to us. The overall point of the p...
In a Facebook group recently, a FB friend asked me why I believe there is a "mind-body problem" that requires resolution. I responded with reference to the classic historical novel (and television mini-series) I,Claudius. Instead of thinking of something new and clever to say in this blog today, I'll repeat what I said there. There is in general the appearance of something intangible in the world, to which one person has privileged access, and the question of how it relates to the tangibles of the world, to which anyone has access. I, Claudius is about a man who appeared from his physicality, from all tangible and public evidence, to be a stuttering idiot. Yet "inside," in some intangible way, he was cunning and clear-eyed -- facts that allowed him to survive as others around him died and in time to become Emperor. (I don't think that really counts as a spoiler -- the charm of the series does not depend on how it will turn out.) ...
I recently read a tweet from a distinguished and academically credentialed philosopher, asking what it would be like to be a thermometer. Specifically, do thermometers have favorite temperatures? Do they ever think about anything other than temperatures? etc. The question was meant as a deliberately provocative way of opening a discussion of panpsychism, the idea that all matter is in some extended sense conscious. But I gave our philosopher a rather smart-ass reply. I said that being a thermometer would be a lot like being a barometer. If you can take the heat, you can take the pressure. Thrown your shoe at the screen. It's your screen, not mine, (and not its own) and it almost certainly won't feel pain.
In yesterday's post I laid out three "neutralist" theories and said something about the relationship of William James' thought to each. I'd like to tie that line of inquiry up a bit today. Again, the theories are: neutral monism; dual aspect theory; panpsychism. What they maintain in each case is that there is some stuff that is neither mental nor physical, and that the mental and physical realms are constructions out of this stuff, so that we can allow for mind-body interaction without freaking out over HOW? For a neutral monist, the stuff is an underlying collection of data or unclassified facts such as an image of a piece of paper. For a dual aspect theory, the stuff is God, the Universe, Everything Considered as a Totality. For a panpsychist, the stuff is, well, mindful matter. Which includes all matter (and, likely enough, all mind.) I shared yesterday, too, my own impression that the first listed of those three arises out of a principle of pars...
One traditional approach to the mind-body problem in philosophy is this: look for some neutral stuff. The interaction of an immaterial consciousness with a material body/brain would seem less mysterious were there some neutral stuff out of which both consciousness and physicality were themselves created. The term "neutral" here means simply that the theorist at issue isn't trying to dissolve one half of the dichotomy into the other. There are three broad types of neutralism, one of which is simply called "neutral monism." The other two that one can put into this category have different names and slightly different approaches: panpsychism, and double-aspect theory. I will say a brief word now about how each of them relates to the philosopher who inspired the existence of this blog: William James. Tomorrow, I'll try to say something about how they are different. Neutral Monism William James is a and perhaps even the key figure in the development ...