First, let’s begin by noting a remarkable fact: Panpsychism seems to have triumphed in the area of theories of consciousness.
Tag: Consciousness
At Mind Matters News: Defending the mind’s reality at a materialist cocktail party
What to say when you find yourself among self-assured elite sloganeers. The actual history of neuroscience in the last century has not been kind to materialist assertions and assumptions.
Science questions whose answers we may never get
Part of the problem is that everyone is dealing from the same deck. No one has “super” consciousness. That must make a difference in understanding.
Is panpsychism replacing materialism?
Panpsychism, in the form of Integrated Information Theory (IIT), is a much more serious competitor to dualism and idealism than materialism could hope to be. Panpsychists are not trying to claim that consciousness is merely an illusion. They may be wrong but they aren’t ridiculous.
Jordan Peterson on consciousness – the hard problem on which materialism is wrecking itself
As for Jordan Peterson, the Woke crybullies have not silenced him.
At Scientific American: Why we live in a simulation
This is likely intended as a spoof: “There is nothing in philosophy or science, no postulates, theories or laws, that would predict the emergence of this experience we call consciousness. Natural laws do not call for its existence, and it certainly does not seem to offer us any evolutionary advantages.” But it happens to be true.
Is science drifting from simple materialism to panpsychism?
It seems to have come down to a choice between “nothing is conscious” and “everything is conscious.” But materialism becomes incoherent when it requires us to believe that we only imagine we are conscious — that’s a basic error in logic.
At Nautilus: A bioelectric theory of consciousness
The hypothesis that consciousness is a function of bioelectric fields includes the notion that our individual cells are conscious. Levin and Dennett are willing to think of parts of the body as agents too. But from what we can tell, whole persons are not agents in Dennett’s view.
Is “consciousness” a useless concept? Michael Egnor makes the case
Egnor: Our mental life is a composite of abilities — arousal, sensation, perception, locomotion, reason, etc., and these abilities appear to subsist in modified form despite dramatic changes in the body and brain.
How a Silicon Valley psychologist can believe consciousness doesn’t exist
The problem with Riach’s view is that the final level of complexity is immaterial and the computer is just not going there.
In new book, a psychologist tries to explain consciousness
Mark Solms clearly assumes, in his Psychology Today column, that the mind is just what the brain does. But that’s precisely the claim that the very existence of consciousness clouds.
Does a cosmopsychist believe in life after death?
Bernardo Kastrup: I certainly believe in consciousness after death. I believe that our core subjectivity, that implicit, innate sense of “I”-ness, remains undifferentiated. That’s the reason you still think you are the same person you were when you were five years old even though everything about you has changed.
A classic Darwinian fairy tale: How the human mind jumpstarted itself into existence
Earlier, Frankish explained that Dennett accounts for consciousness as “a temporary level of organisation—a ‘virtual system’—that we create for ourselves through certain learned habits of self-stimulation.” But what are the concepts “we,” “ourselves,” and “self-” even doing in this discussion? If consciousness is an illusion, these concepts are illusions that cannot create anything.
Michael Egnor and Bernardo Kastrup: Why consciousness couldn’t just evolve from the mud
Kastrup, a philosopher and computer scientist, does not accept a Darwinian account of the evolution of consciousness and is is also sympathetic to the basic intuitions behind the idea that there is design in nature (intelligent design theory).
At Inspiring Philosophy: There is no evidence that the brain creates consciousness
In this Part 3, physicalist arguments are debunked.