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At Quartz: Materialists are converting to panpsychism

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Everything is conscious, many now say. From Olivia Goldhill at Quartz:

The materialist viewpoint states that consciousness is derived entirely from physical matter. It’s unclear, though, exactly how this could work. “It’s very hard to get consciousness out of non-consciousness,” says Chalmers. “Physics is just structure. It can explain biology, but there’s a gap: Consciousness.” Dualism holds that consciousness is separate and distinct from physical matter—but that then raises the question of how consciousness interacts and has an effect on the physical world.

Panpsychism offers an attractive alternative solution: Consciousness is a fundamental feature of physical matter; every single particle in existence has an “unimaginably simple” form of consciousness, says Goff. These particles then come together to form more complex forms of consciousness, such as humans’ subjective experiences. This isn’t meant to imply that particles have a coherent worldview or actively think, merely that there’s some inherent subjective experience of consciousness in even the tiniest particle.

Panpsychism doesn’t necessarily imply that every inanimate object is conscious. “Panpsychists usually don’t take tables and other artifacts to be conscious as a whole,” writes Hedda Hassel Mørch, a philosophy researcher at New York University’s Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness, in an email. “Rather, the table could be understood as a collection of particles that each have their own very simple form of consciousness.” More.

So this is naturalism (nature is all there is) today: Particles have consciousness (and rocks have minds) but human consciousness is an illusion.

And the naturalist’s biggest problem, to hear him tell it, is the persistence of stubborn doubt about naturalism.

See also: The universe may be conscious?

Evading hard problem of human consciousness: Consciousness is in everything!

Latest consciousness theory: Rocks have minds

and

The illusion of consciousness sees through itself.

Comments
This is just another version of the Song of the Dammed. Maybe sung up a half step or to a different melody but agnostics & atheists are just continously shoveling the same steaming pile of earth shattering, mind numbing, crap that now it's just embarrassing. "Free will is an illusion and here's why you should freely change your mind and believe me " "Time is an illusion & BTW the universe is 13 billion years old" "I don't believe in things I can't see or prove so God didn't create the universe .. BTW there's a magic everything maker machine that just so happens to pop out universes that look designed " "My life's work is about a pandas thumb. I'm the goodest at being rational " haha At some point we must realize we're not actually conversing with legitimate thinkers-- but the town drunk.Absolutely
February 24, 2018
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One for a philosopher, maybe.
As a philosopher masquerading as a computer programmer, I think that most jobs are best suited for philosophers :)johnnyb
January 31, 2018
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johnny b I would judge that things depend on whether the "scientific establishment" in its role as Custodian of Truth is able to spin panpsychism as merely a development of Science™, rather than a volte face in metaphysics. Seems to me they could claim it's just following on from Ernst Mayr's teleonomy, which they have accepted for decades, and wave their hands about "emergent phenomena" as is currently the case with the human mind. In that way, they still appear, at least, to be just doing materialism. Bear in mind how many of the early theistic evolution theorists, like Barbour and Griffin, were influenced by process theism, partly because it enabled them to remain loyal to methodological naturalism and keep in the scientific mainstream. Keep the Whitehead philosophy, and lose God, and perhaps atheism can still maintain the naturalistic high ground. So it sounds to me like the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic teleology is a big, proactive, research project for now, rather than a reactive one once teleology in biology becomes the new orthodoxy. One for a philosopher, maybe.Jon Garvey
January 30, 2018
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Jon Garvey - Yes and no. I agree that, if there is any group who would be able to create such a distinction, it would be the ID movement. Nonetheless, I don't think that the ID movement is necessarily a "responsible party" for its lack of development. Intellectual development doesn't follow a predictable path, much less a dictated one. We jump from knowledge to knowledge as it presents itself to us. I almost agree that ID could lead to a more robust secularism. However, consider this. If secularism starts to embrace teleology, then upon what will it base its claim for superiority over other ideas? Right now, secularism is winning because they feel they can lay claim to be more-or-less "above it all". Once that is gone, then secularists are merely one party among many in the conversation. So, I do cheer for a more robust secularism, precisely because that will include more participants in the discussion, and will remove the inappropriate deference paid to secularism in the modern era. Additionally, ID will help in the move towards an extrinsic teleology, simply because ID is currently the only game in town with explicit tools dealing with any notion of teleology whatsoever. The others are behind by several decades, and I imagine their pride will stand in the way of building on what ID has done during that time.johnnyb
January 30, 2018
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Seversky @ 4: Not everyone views God through the lens of Jeffersonian deism.LocalMinimum
January 30, 2018
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What’s really funny about this is that they don’t seem to realize that in converting to panpsychism, they are also agreeing with Intelligent Design.
This is more serious than one might think, for those to whom ID is not an end in itself, but a challenge to materialist atheism. I wrote a piece only last month predicting that, if scientists were compelled to accept teleology in life without a deeper study of that teleology, the prevailing worldview was likely to become a form of atheistic panpsychism. If Intelligent Design fails to develop any program to distinguish intrinsic teleogy (teleonomy) from extrinsic teleology (a truly intelligent being) it will only have itself to blame for the development of a more robust secularism.Jon Garvey
January 30, 2018
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All: To clarify, we do not make this stuff up. My mom would say, of a crackpot: He has rocks in his head. Today, crackpot: It's true! Everything is conscious rocks! In Mom's day (1924-2016), that wasn't science. Things have sure changed.News
January 30, 2018
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as to:
“Physics is just structure. It can explain biology, but there’s a gap: Consciousness.
Actually besides consciousness being unexplainable by physics, there is a 'gap' in biology also. i.e. Biology cannot be explained by physics. He states that “Physics is just structure" and yet the question of how macroscopic "structures" and/or biological forms come about will forever be beyond the explanatory power of physics. In the following article entitled 'Quantum physics problem proved unsolvable', which studied the derivation of macroscopic properties from a complete microscopic description, the researchers remark that even a perfect and complete description of the microscopic properties of a material is not enough to predict its macroscopic behaviour.,,, The researchers further commented that their findings challenge the reductionists' point of view, as the insurmountable difficulty lies precisely in the derivation of macroscopic properties from a microscopic description."
Quantum physics problem proved unsolvable: Godel and Turing enter quantum physics - December 9, 2015 Excerpt: A mathematical problem underlying fundamental questions in particle and quantum physics is provably unsolvable,,, It is the first major problem in physics for which such a fundamental limitation could be proven. The findings are important because they show that even a perfect and complete description of the microscopic properties of a material is not enough to predict its macroscopic behaviour.,,, "We knew about the possibility of problems that are undecidable in principle since the works of Turing and Gödel in the 1930s," added Co-author Professor Michael Wolf from Technical University of Munich. "So far, however, this only concerned the very abstract corners of theoretical computer science and mathematical logic. No one had seriously contemplated this as a possibility right in the heart of theoretical physics before. But our results change this picture. From a more philosophical perspective, they also challenge the reductionists' point of view, as the insurmountable difficulty lies precisely in the derivation of macroscopic properties from a microscopic description." http://phys.org/news/2015-12-quantum-physics-problem-unsolvable-godel.html
In fact as the following video shows, there is now fairly compelling evidence that immaterial information is coming into a developing embryo from outside spacetime
Darwinism vs Biological Form - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyNzNPgjM4w Paper: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1t8g9fXk9H7A-s1APa8Y90AGv6iKkJshzbiDVkTqBEI0/edit
Chalmers goes on to state,,,
”Dualism holds that consciousness is separate and distinct from physical matter—but that then raises the question of how consciousness interacts and has an effect on the physical world.
Chalmers main mistake is that he presupposes causation to be less mysterious than volition.
A Professor's Journey out of Nihilism: Why I am not an Atheist - University of Wyoming - J. Budziszewski Excerpt page12: "There were two great holes in the argument about the irrelevance of God. The first is that in order to attack free will, I supposed that I understood cause and effect; I supposed causation to be less mysterious than volition. If anything, it is the other way around. I can perceive a logical connection between premises and valid conclusions. I can perceive at least a rational connection between my willing to do something and my doing it. But between the apple and the earth, I can perceive no connection at all. Why does the apple fall? We don't know. "But there is gravity," you say. No, "gravity" is merely the name of the phenomenon, not its explanation. "But there are laws of gravity," you say. No, the "laws" are not its explanation either; they are merely a more precise description of the thing to be explained, which remains as mysterious as before. For just this reason, philosophers of science are shy of the term "laws"; they prefer "lawlike regularities." To call the equations of gravity "laws" and speak of the apple as "obeying" them is to speak as though, like the traffic laws, the "laws" of gravity are addressed to rational agents capable of conforming their wills to the command. This is cheating, because it makes mechanical causality (the more opaque of the two phenomena) seem like volition (the less). In my own way of thinking the cheating was even graver, because I attacked the less opaque in the name of the more. The other hole in my reasoning was cruder. If my imprisonment in a blind causality made my reasoning so unreliable that I couldn't trust my beliefs, then by the same token I shouldn't have trusted my beliefs about imprisonment in a blind causality. But in that case I had no business denying free will in the first place." http://www.undergroundthomist.org/sites/default/files/WhyIAmNotAnAtheist.pdf
Chalmers then goes on to state:
Panpsychism offers an attractive alternative solution: Consciousness is a fundamental feature of physical matter;
There is a huge evidential "gap" in Chalmers reasoning. Namely, it is now shown that physical matter does not exist until someone looks at it. ,,, Here is a delayed choice experiment that was done with atoms:
Experiment confirms quantum theory weirdness - May 27, 2015 Excerpt: The bizarre nature of reality as laid out by quantum theory has survived another test, with scientists performing a famous experiment and proving that reality does not exist until it is measured. Physicists at The Australian National University (ANU) have conducted John Wheeler's delayed-choice thought experiment, which involves a moving object that is given the choice to act like a particle or a wave. Wheeler's experiment then asks - at which point does the object decide? Common sense says the object is either wave-like or particle-like, independent of how we measure it. But quantum physics predicts that whether you observe wave like behavior (interference) or particle behavior (no interference) depends only on how it is actually measured at the end of its journey. This is exactly what the ANU team found. "It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it," said Associate Professor Andrew Truscott from the ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering. Despite the apparent weirdness, the results confirm the validity of quantum theory, which,, has enabled the development of many technologies such as LEDs, lasers and computer chips. The ANU team not only succeeded in building the experiment, which seemed nearly impossible when it was proposed in 1978, but reversed Wheeler's original concept of light beams being bounced by mirrors, and instead used atoms scattered by laser light. "Quantum physics' predictions about interference seem odd enough when applied to light, which seems more like a wave, but to have done the experiment with atoms, which are complicated things that have mass and interact with electric fields and so on, adds to the weirdness," said Roman Khakimov, PhD student at the Research School of Physics and Engineering. http://phys.org/news/2015-05-quantum-theory-weirdness.html
A few more notes:
Double Slit, Quantum-Electrodynamics, and Christian Theism – video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AK9kGpIxMRM 1. Consciousness either preceded all of material reality or is a ‘epi-phenomena’ of material reality. 2. If consciousness is a ‘epi-phenomena’ of material reality then consciousness will be found to have no special position within material reality. Whereas conversely, if consciousness precedes material reality then consciousness will be found to have a special position within material reality. 3. Consciousness is found to have a special, even a central position within material reality. 4. Therefore, consciousness is found to precede material reality. Five intersecting lines of experimental evidence from quantum mechanics that shows that consciousness precedes material reality (Double Slit, Wigner’s Quantum Symmetries, Wheeler’s Delayed Choice, Leggett’s Inequalities, Quantum Zeno effect): - Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness: 5 Experiments – video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5qphmi8gYE
Quote, Verse and Video
as Francis Schaeffer said, "Christianity is not merely religious truth, it is total truth- truth about the whole of reality.” - Nancy R. Pearcey, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from its Cultural Captivity Colossians 1:15-20 The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. Quantum Mechanics, Special Relativity, General Relativity and Christianity - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKggH8jO0pk
bornagain77
January 30, 2018
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Not panpsychism, just honest science. There is no logical reason to EXCLUDE anything from consciousness. We don't even know the exact mechanism that gives us awareness, so we can't begin to exclude other mechanisms. We've been looking for this mechanism for about 200 years, and its location or function is growing LESS certain, not more.polistra
January 30, 2018
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Perhaps the entire Universe is the mind of God. But if there's a multiverse, maybe He has multiple personality disorder. That would explain the inconsistent behavior.Seversky
January 29, 2018
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It just keeps getting clearer and clearer, "The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God"JDH
January 29, 2018
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"...there’s some inherent subjective experience of consciousness in even the tiniest particle." Are we are to consider or not that a universe composed of particles with said (immeasurable) property may constitute a Mind?LocalMinimum
January 29, 2018
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What's really funny about this is that they don't seem to realize that in converting to panpsychism, they are also agreeing with Intelligent Design. Ooops.johnnyb
January 29, 2018
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