From Berit Brogaard at Psychology Today:
A new volume of papers on panpsychism edited by philosophers Godehard Bruntrup and Ludwig Jaskolla just appeared with Oxford University Press. It features paper by prominent philosophers David Chalmers, Galen Strawson and Brian McLaughlin, among many others. According to the traditional version of panpsychism, everything around you is conscious: the chair your are sitting on, the rock you use as a doorstopper at home and the thick hurricane-safe windows in your office. Panpsychism literally means that particular kinds of psychological states are embedded in everything. An alternative to the traditional view is the view that everything around you has a form of rudimentary consciousness. More.
Brogaard suggests, “…we can imagine that there is qualitative consciousness at lower levels of organization that lacks the intensity and subjectivity of animal consciousness.”
Indeed. We can imagine anything we want. Our ancestors imagined talking trees and knives. It was science that banished all that, but then science became captive to naturalism (nature is all there is). So it is getting nowhere with problems like origin of life or consciousness.
And the discpline now seems to be devolving into two streams: Everything has consciousness (rocks have minds), as above, and consciousness is a hallucination.
See also: OOL: RNA more flexible than thought, but then also more error-prone The authors do not spell this out, of course, but more trial and error means more error as well as more trial. Which raises a question: What is driving the process? Why would dead matter keep trying to become alive? On the other hand, maybe, as some naturalists hold, rocks have minds. It comes down to that for them.
Researcher: Never mind the “hard problem of consciousness”: The real one is… “Our experiences of being and having a body are ‘controlled hallucinations’ of a very distinctive kind”
Neuroscience tried wholly embracing naturalism, but then the brain got away
and Evolution bred a sense of reality out of us
Follow UD News at Twitter!