(January 26, 2023 at 11:40 am)emjay Wrote:(January 26, 2023 at 11:14 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: I think it's flatly wrong, but I respect that a competent argument could be made for it. There are alot of ideas I don't agree with, but my habit is to look for things that are either common to most explanations.. or certainly true even if the explanation they're in is false. You know, what's the kernel of truth that sent someone down a rabbit hole and ultimately compelled them to believe in some incorrect thing? I think the kernel for panpsychism being that phenomenal content is more ubiquitous and can exist much further "down" the line of structural complexity, as we conceive of it. If you can be convinced of that, then it's not difficult to concieve of phenomenal content as belonging to a more fundamental set of interactions than any which occur in a human brain in particular. Can it be taken all the way down to the atomic level, the subatomic..... let's ask the folks at the lhc. See if they've detected any subjectivity fields/particles.
Yes well, I've always wondered about what the simplest sort of system that could have consciousness... so I have no problem with there being degrees of complexity of consciousness in that sense... but it would still probably have to be a system to me, and that's the main difference to me between Panpsychism, and other theories; ie the difference between saying lots of individual things - particles or whatever - have individual, collective, or accumulated consciousness ie basically quantifiable, vs some collection of things, a functional unit of some kind, a neural circuit for instance, being responsible. I can't say it's wrong... on paper I guess both are just as radical as each other, as has been said before - but it is completely at odds with how I do think about consciousness as it stands.
Keep in mind panpsychism is meant to be a response to the hard problem itself. Philosophers who hold to a panpsychist view like Philip Goff, Galen Strawson, and even David Chalmers (for a while, at least) tend to (1) very strongly believe (actually, even infallibly so) that phenomenal consciousness is real, (2) find it extremely challenging to account for the emergence of consciousness from brains using the standard physicalist account, and yet (3) still hold to physicalism to a very strong extent at least. They don't do this because they're looking for something fancy to mystify them more or something. They do this in response to the observations made.
Now, sure, panpsychism at the core is mostly speculative, typically vague and suffers its own exclusive problems (such as the combination problem). And it's malleable: you could tweak it however you see fit in order to harmonize it as best you can with what the current sciences say, which renders it a very bad "theory" of course. But like I said earlier, it's not really meant to be a theory, but sort of a template for more specific versions.
And you could combine panpsychism with emergentism as well, so you could then have a hybrid view and you'd still require the CNS for human consciousness in particular. Maybe the brain then "flares up" the consciousness contained within its arrangement of atoms or something everytime specific patterns of neural firings occur, and this leads to the experience of consciousness.
Just an illustration, of course.
