Panpsychism

[Apech]

Interesting article in the Guardian about how scientists are trying to come to terms with consciousness - the so called Hard Problem.

 

 

in the last few years, several scientists and philosophers, Chalmers and Koch among them, have begun to look seriously again at a viewpoint so bizarre that it has been neglected for more than a century, except among followers of eastern spiritual traditions, or in the kookier corners of the new age. This is “panpsychism”, the dizzying notion that everything in the universe might be conscious, or at least potentially conscious, or conscious when put into certain configurations. Koch concedes that this sounds ridiculous: when he mentions panpsychism, he has written, “I often encounter blank stares of incomprehension.” But when it comes to grappling with the Hard Problem, crazy-sounding theories are an occupational hazard. Besides, panpsychism might help unravel an enigma that has attached to the study of consciousness from the start: if humans have it, and apes have it, and dogs and pigs probably have it, and maybe birds, too – well, where does it stop?

 

 

The argument unfolds as follows: physicists have no problem accepting that certain fundamental aspects of reality – such as space, mass, or electrical charge – just do exist. They can’t be explained as being the result of anything else. Explanations have to stop somewhere. The panpsychist hunch is that consciousness could be like that, too – and that if it is, there is no particular reason to assume that it only occurs in certain kinds of matter.

 

 

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jan/21/-sp-why-cant-worlds-greatest-minds-solve-mystery-consciousness

[FmAm]

Chasing reality is like running in a dream. You run and run, but can't get anywhere. Same thing may be happening in cosmology and quantum physics. That's why I like to think we are living in dreams, and those dreams could be all that exists.

 

Imagine you were a physicist in a dream, trying to find out the secrets of reality. What kind of results would you get in that dream? Probably absurd results, with nothing really to hold on. Just like in this reality.

Edited January 21, 2015 by FmAm

[Zhongyongdaoist]

It's funny that the article that you reference is titled:

 

Why can’t the world’s greatest minds solve the mystery of consciousness?

 

and continues with this:

 

What jolted Chalmers’s audience from their torpor was how he had framed the question. “At the coffee break, I went around like a playwright on opening night, eavesdropping,” Hameroff said. “And everyone was like: ‘Oh! The Hard Problem! The Hard Problem! That’s why we’re here!’” Philosophers had pondered the so-called “mind-body problem” for centuries. But Chalmers’s particular manner of reviving it “reached outside philosophy and galvanised everyone. It defined the field. It made us ask: what the hell is this that we’re dealing with here?”What jolted Chalmers’s audience from their torpor was how he had framed the question. “At the coffee break, I went around like a playwright on opening night, eavesdropping,” Hameroff said. “And everyone was like: ‘Oh! The Hard Problem! The Hard Problem! That’s why we’re here!’” Philosophers had pondered the so-called “mind-body problem” for centuries. But Chalmers’s particular manner of reviving it “reached outside philosophy and galvanised everyone. It defined the field. It made us ask: what the hell is this that we’re dealing with here?” (Empahsis mine, ZYD)

 

The answer to the question of the article was posed and answered by E. A. Burtt in the late 1920s, and it is simply that modern "Great MInds" think about and formulate the "problem" incorrectly and have since about 1700. The "problem" was created by the revival of Epicureanism in the Seventeenth Century and its uncritical acceptance as a fundamental worldview by the architects of the "modern" worldview, Decartes, Newton and Locke. In a previous post I quoted from Burtt's Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science:

 

It may be, however, that Newton is an exceedingly important figure for still a third reason. He not only found a precise mathematical use for concepts like force, mass, inertia ; he gave new meanings to the old terms space, time, and motion, which had hitherto been unimportant but were now becoming the fundamental categories of men's thinking. In his treatment of such ultimate concepts, together with his doctrine of primary and secondary qualities, his notion of the nature of the physical universe and of its relation to human knowledge (in all of which he carried to a more influential position a movement already well advanced) —in a word, in his decisive portrayal of the ultimate postulates of the new science and its successful method as they appeared to him, Newton was constituting himself a philosopher rather than a scientist as we now distinguish them. He was presenting a metaphysical groundwork for the mathematical march of mind which in him had achieved its most notable victories. Imbedded directly and prominently in the Principia, Newton's most widely studied work, these metaphysical notions were carried wherever his scientific influence penetrated, and borrowed a possibly unjustified certainty from the clear demonstrability of the gravitational theorems to which they are appended as Scholia. Newton was unrivalled as a scientist—it may appear that he is not above criticism as a metaphysician. He tried scrupulously, at least in his experimental work, to avoid metaphysics. He disliked hypotheses, by which he meant explanatory propositions which were not immediately deduced from phenomena. At the same time, following his illustrious predecessors, he does give or assume definite answers to such fundamental questions as the nature of space, time, and matter ; the relations of man with the objects of his knowledge ; and it is just such answers that constitute metaphysics. The fact that his treatment of these great themes—borne as it was over the educated world by the weight of his scientific prestige—was covered over by this cloak of positivism, may have become itself a danger. It may have helped not a little to insinuate a set of uncritically accepted ideas about the world into the common intellectual background of the modern man. What Newton did not distinguish, others were not apt carefully to analyse. The actual achievements of the new science were undeniable furthermore, the old set of categories, involving, as it appeared, the now discredited medieval physics, was no longer an alternative to any competent thinker. In these circumstances it is easy to understand how modern philosophy might have been led into certain puzzles which were due to the unchallenged presence of these new categories and presuppositions. p.20-21

The French Encyclopdists and materialists of the middle of the eighteenth century felt themselves one and all to be more consistent Newtonians than Newton himself. p. 21 to 22

The only way to bring this issue to the bar of truth is to plunge into the philosophy of early modern science, locating its key assumptions as they appear, and following them out to their classic formulation in the metaphysical paragraphs of Sir Isaac Newton. The present is a brief historical study which aims to meet this need. The analysis will be sufficiently detailed to allow our characters to do much speaking for themselves, and to lay bare as explicitly as possible the real interests and methods revealed in their work. At its close the reader will understand more clearly the nature of modern thinking and judge more accurately the validity of the contemporary scientific world-view. p. 22 (E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science, Emphasis mine, ZYD)

 

The link in the Quote will lead to an online version of Burtt's book, which is a must read for anyone who wants to understand why these "Great Minds" can't get a grasp on these issues.

 

Better answers were available in the West, largely those deriving from Plato and his followers, and in point of fact dominated Western thinking from the middle of the Hellenistic period to 1700. Modern materialism, far from being typical of Western Philosophy, is an aberration. What was lost in the Seventeenth Century was an intellectually rigorous Philosophy, that was fundamentally "holistic" and put consciousness in a central position of its worldview.

[Apech]

I agree that the problem lies with a wrongly formulated question (in part) but it is interesting that the very mind which in all its ingenuity produces science and technology produces for itself a 'Hard Problem' ... which is essentially itself.

 

I suspect hylozoism is due for a comeback in a big way (especially if linked politically to Gaia and Green Movement) ... I see a new pantheism coming down the track. or possibly its already arrived and I missed it.

[Zhongyongdaoist]

I agree that the problem lies with a wrongly formulated question (in part) but it is interesting that the very mind which in all its ingenuity produces science and technology produces for itself a 'Hard Problem' ... which is essentially itself.

 

I suspect hylozoism is due for a comeback in a big way (especially if linked politically to Gaia and Green Movement) ... I see a new pantheism coming down the track. or possibly its already arrived and I missed it. (Emphasis mine, ZYD)

 

It essentially arrived with the conjunctions of Pluto and Uranus in Virgo, a "Triple Pass", in which the two planets had three conjunctions as is typical with the conjunctions of the outer planets, in the mid-1960s. Look at all the changes that have happened since then, that have been in the direction which you describe.

 

I'm rather rushed right now, but I will post more if I have time.

 

 

 

 

Edit: Took out an unnecessary two before "three conjunctions"

Edited January 21, 2015 by Zhongyongdaoist

[Apech]

It essentially arrived with the conjunctions of Pluto and Uranus in Virgo, a "Triple Pass", in which the two planets had three conjunctions as is typical with the conjunctions of the outer planets, in the mid-1960s. Look at all the changes that have happened since then, that have been in the direction which you describe.

 

I'm rather rushed right now, but I will post more if I have time.

 

 

 

 

Edit: Took out an unnecessary two before "three conjunctions"

 

I guess that was the start of something. What will really trigger something I think are experiments which show some kind of conscious response in so called dead matter. I know, I know ... quantum mechanics ... but I mean something more conclusive and undeniable where the results of empirical experiments knock those white-coats onto their behinds.

[Zhongyongdaoist]

I guess that was the start of something. What will really trigger something I think are experiments which show some kind of conscious response in so called dead matter. I know, I know ... quantum mechanics ... but I mean something more conclusive and undeniable where the results of empirical experiments knock those white-coats onto their behinds. (Emphasis mine, ZYD)

 

I am afraid this buys into the myth of "experimentalism", the notion that "Science" is founded on experiments and "Scientists" are influenced solely by them. Nothing could be further from the truth.

 

If you look at the "Scientific Revolution" for example, precious little of it is founded on experiment and just about everything is based on advances in mathematics, in particular algebra and analytic geometry, which allowed Newton to create a radically different model of the world in a strong mathematical form. It was in essence an intellectual revolution, a radical change in the way people thought about the world. The power of this mathematical model demolished traditional Western cosmology like a tsunami and reduced the intellectual landscape of Europe to ruins, buried beneath a mass of Epicurean "atoms" and occupied by people whose minds were now "blank slates" ready to be written on by whatever came along bearing the conquering banner of Newton. This is what Burtt is referring to when he says:

 

The fact that his treatment of these great themes—borne as it was over the educated world by the weight of his scientific prestige—was covered over by this cloak of positivism, may have become itself a danger. It may have helped not a little to insinuate a set of uncritically accepted ideas about the world into the common intellectual background of the modern man.

 

Such doctrines as atomism and consciousness as a "tabula rasa", blank until written upon by the experience of "objective" reality by the senses, were never "proved" experimentally, but carried along with the momentum of the Newtonian flood, were given a force and respectability that they did not deserve. When the ability to test these ideas was finally available, atoms vanished in quantum foam and "tabula rasa" psychology of Locke was replaced by the "Cognitive Revolution".

 

As long as one buys into the "Materialist Mythology", that materialism is "rational", that it is the fruit of "Scientific Method", the it is founded on "Experiment", one is powerless against the ontological commitments which are at the root of the modern materialist ideology.

 

What is needed is an intellectual "reformation" that will challenge on every point the unexamined presuppositions which are the foundation of materialist ideology and offer an intellectually rigorous reinterpretation of the phenomena which have actually been experimentally demonstrated and observed in a context that is not a reductionist framework, but a holistic one, and such a rigorous framework is not provided by ". . . followers of eastern spiritual traditions", or found ". . . in the kookier corners of the new age." It is however, provided by Platonism.

[FmAm]

What is needed is an intellectual "reformation" that will challenge on every point the unexamined presuppositions which are the foundation of materialist ideology and offer an intellectually rigorous reinterpretation of the phenomena which have actually been experimentally demonstrated and observed in a context that is not a reductionist framework, but a holistic one, and such a rigorous framework is not provided by ". . . followers of eastern spiritual traditions", or found ". . . in the kookier corners of the new age." It is however, provided by Platonism.

 

Do you mean Platonism or Neoplatonism?

 

I think what is needed is an emotional reformation; a shift away from egoism. A change in the "heart". Holism can't be assimilated externally. It has to be lived. We have to deeply understand that when we humans are researching nature as scientists, the nature is actually researching itself. This is an intellectual no-brainer, but it's really hard to internalize, even to scientists. Because in a way it means giving up the chance of finding the Absolute.

 

And it doesn't actually matter whether we think in a materialistic way or not. Materialistic logic leads to holism.

- - -

 

(Science has been idealistic for a long time: http://milesmathis.com/quant.html)

Edited January 22, 2015 by FmAm

[Nikolai1]

What is needed is an intellectual "reformation" that will challenge on every point the unexamined presuppositions which are the foundation of materialist ideology and offer an intellectually rigorous reinterpretation of the phenomena which have actually been experimentally demonstrated and observed in a context that is not a reductionist framework, but a holistic one, and such a rigorous framework is not provided by ". . . followers of eastern spiritual traditions", or found ". . . in the kookier corners of the new age."

 

I think Ken Wilber's Integral system does precisely this, and yet when I read it I am left with an overwhelming 'so what?' feeling.

 

To have the ability to be truly holistic in your thought is simultaneously a transcendence of thought systems in general. The ability to be holistic is the ability to live without the need for analysis to shape our actions.

 

Those who need analysis will inevitably revert from one restrictive paradigm to the next. Before scientific materialism was a restrictive Christian deism.

 

I agree with the OP that a certain panpsychism may return. It is consistent with the deep ecology that is now firmly mainstream, and is starting to shift from the merely intellectual to the ethical realm. To make environmentally ethical choices is now shaping human behaviour at every level of society. We run our households differently, we consume differently and our industrial actions are different. Gaia theory which sees planet Earth as an organism like a an animal or a person is still a bit avant-garde but will percolate into the hearts and minds of all.

 

And when all this takes root, those few humans who are truly transcendent thinkers will lament the restrictiveness of the new paradigm that everyone else thinks is ancient and inviolable.

[Zhongyongdaoist]

Having thought about both of the above posts I think the best way for me to reply for now is to articulate my own position, because the responses to my own post are response to what the posters think I am saying and not what I mean. Such a response is natural given the state of thought as it exists today.

If I had to characterize the modern Western mindset, and this includes those other cultures that have been sufficiently Westernized to share all or most of those ideas that make up that mindset, I would have to characterize it, albeit somewhat humorously, as a society of “Closet Cartesians” suffering from “Post Romantic Stress Syndrome”. This is a funny way of talking about how Descartes' sundering of mind and body and Kant's separation of “Reason" and "Intuition” have “dis-eased” Western Society, and lead to such cultural manifestations of rock bands singing songs about how “we are spirits in the material world”, thanks to Descartes and science fiction writers inventing fictional characters such as Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy, to enter into a perpetual and unresolvable debate between “cold, hard logic” and “emotion”, and other manifestations of these two fundamental fractures of human wholeness.

The reason why I quote from Benjamin Whichote in my Tao Bums signature:

'... I oppose not rational to spiritual; for spiritual is most rational . . .”

Is to point back to a pre-Cartesian and pre-Kantian way of thinking which Ernst Cassirer beautifully articulated in his book, The Platonic Renaissance in England. It is a viewpoint which we may call Christian Neo-Platonism and while I do not share the Christian part of it, but I do share the Platonic part of it. Now, I say Platonic part of "Christian Neo-Platonism" because I characterize this form of Christianity as Neo-Platonism not because of its inclusion of late Platonist, such as Plotinus and Proclus, but because it is a Christian adaptation of Platonism, just as I would call some of Augustine thought “Christian Neo-Platonism”, but I would call Plotinus a Platonist. Plotinus himself certainly thought of himself as a Platonist, and why anyone would wish to call him anything but a late Platonist, in analogy with Middle Platonism is beyond me, but then I have a thorough ground in Plato and I suspect that people who ask questions like “Do you mean 'Platonism or Neoplatonism” don't. I see this distinction as being largely drawn by people who, on the one hand, want to separate Plato “the Rationalist” from the misguided “Mysticism” of Plotinus, or an the other hand, want to make Plato the shortsighted “Rational” precursor of of Plotinus' deeply insightful, fully articulated “Mysticism”, derived from his “Mystical Experiences”, which he must have had in spite of his Platonism, not because of it. What my study of Platonism, in the sense in which I use it, did lead to was the notion of “Rational Mysticism”, the idea, partly derived from my teenage thinking about Gödel's Theorem, that any axiomatized system necessarily points beyond itself and from my thinking, around the age of thirty, about Proclus' Element's of Theology, that also, any transcendental worldview could be put in axiomatic form, and moreover that no one who understood Plato's distinction between “opinion” and “knowledge”, would ever confuse such as “system” of thought with “knowledge”, and therefore be restricted by it. Oh, and I suppose that I should point out that for Plato, knowledge is just the type of experience that is usually called "mystical".

For similar reasons, for me, any distinction between ”intellect” and “emotion” is a false distinction, and I will not divide myself up that way just because of a mistake made circa 1800, makes that distinction a “self evident' truth to those who uncritically adopt it just because it is an almost universally accepted modern “Western” cultural meme. So if I call for an “intellectual reformation”, I am talking about a reformation that is a return to wholeness, in which the link between thought and feeling is fully acknowledged and this is not just something that can be simply talked about, “philosophy” in the sense in which I use it is an activity that must be lived and talking about it, acting on it, contemplating it and ritualizing it, are all parts of that philosophical activity, oh, and yes, also analyzing it, because any life pretending to be a philosophical life which is not an analyzed life, is not a truly Philosophical Life, and, as a clever fellow once observed in Athens long ago, not a life worth living. I worked very hard cleaning the detritus of Decartes and Kant out of my conscious and unconscious mental closet, but it was definitely worth it.

I can articulate this perspective at great length, citing historical sources and engaging in a lot deeply analytical “stuff”, including a thoroughgoing critique of Ken Wilbur's “system”, which I examined and found wanting back in the 1980s because it simply arranges little closed boxes of cultural memes in a pretty pattern without really analyzing the content of those boxes and subjecting them to rigorous analysis, but frankly I don't have the time to do so, I wish I did, but I don't and besides a series of posts on the Tao Bums is not the right medium for that.

 

I hope that all of this is helpful in understanding my position, but I can't do much more now and also, we would be in danger of getting way off topic.

 

Oh, the topic, yes, well, once you have put forward the idea of a "Soul of the World", which Plato basically does in his Timaeus, you have articulated the idea of the world as a unified, living being and that great "Soul of the World", which he further filled with myriad souls, ranging from Gods to humans and many in between, then becomes a vast community of souls. Panpsychism, sure why not.

[Nikolai1]

Hi Donald,

 

I'm sure you and I wold have an immense amount to agree on, although you are right that taobums is not always the best place but a long afternoon and a large pot of coffee would be.

 

What we are calling analysis, I always view as a means to an end, it is a phase we must all go through, but it is a project that is possible of completion. To question is to be in error and analysis cures of our need to ask question.

 

Ramana Maharai said that beyond science lies philosophy,and beyond philosophy is where true religion starts. This is quite a hard statement to understand if you equate religion with such things as bible study, theodicy etc. But even so, this is the perspective which views the examined life as only the beginning of the life that is really worth living.

 

My OP here explains myself quite well

 

http://thetaobums.com/topic/30902-the-philosophers-tao/

Edited January 23, 2015 by Nikolai1

[Apech]

Donald and Nikolai,

 

While I agree essentially with Donald's analysis of what went wrong with Western Philosophy, if I can characterise his post like that, what encouraged me about the article I quoted in the OP was that even the pragmatic empiricists (or materialists) recognise they have a problem (or at least some of them do). And it is possible that as they are engaged in the 'project' of scientifically testing things, sooner or later the continuum they are trying to dissect will turn round and bite them. I think there may be two ways of looking at this .... one is hylozoism i.e. everything is aware or sentience is universal and the other similarly is to argue that all that we are engaged with is mind itself anyway and that matter is just a projection by consciousness of consciousness itself in the mode of appearing passively responsive.

[Seth Ananda]

I dont really have anything meaningful to add here, but my delighted heart wanted to say it brings me such joy to see subjects like panpsychism, pantheism, panentheism, and animism starting to regain a foothold in the perspectives and hopefully experiences of the collective.

 

carry on...

[Nungali]

I think it has already a 'foothold' , we have just 'lost' a way of dealing with it. We developed the 'recent' outlook (for whatever reason we 'had' to ). After a time of 'thinking a certain way' .... wheel ruts.

 

.

 

How long have humans been around ? How long has the dualistic split 'reality' been around ?

 

Although (for some) , all that past 'programming' seems irrelevant - they dont seem 'affected' by it . Others seem to have the past programs embedded and surfacing along with the 'new' outlook. That seems to result in the 'new outlook - dualism' trying to explain other experienced 'reality'.

 

So then people start coming up with literal interpretations for 'mystical' experience .

 

Harpur lists the 'typical UFO encounter' and seeks various explanations from different cultures when they hear the experience described ; obvious encounter in the faerie realm; typical manifestation of the Virgin Mary, close encounter of the 2nd kind and the explanations from the actual people involved in the event (tribal Africans) a visit from the ancestors.

 

Now, in the modern western paradigm, we have these 'choices' ; the 'witness was either; hallucinating, exaggerating, lying, hoaxing, misinterpreted ( swamp gas, military, Venus, etc. ) mistaken in observation, etc. Pshaw! - skeptic

 

The other side which rejects those explanations assumes, there really are aliens in UFOs that visit and abduct us on the physical plane (even though some of those experiences have close similarity, in theme, with some shamanic experiences). - ' believer'.

 

Some go a bit further and postulate 'aliens' may be variant dimensional beings or something. Further into a 'syndrome' aliens seem to become more demonic ( not daemonic ) .

 

IMO, the modern mind set is good for discovering and applying some things about a reality (however relative that one is at this time of our development ? ) ... but it doesn't seem a good model for all 'realities' (or perhaps I should call them ; all 'perceived realities'.

 

Yeah, I have some romantic fantasy that it is all for a 'purpose' and both will come together as we 'evolve' into a new advanced ... paradigm . Time will tell.