… I’m not claiming panpsychism is true, although this significantly increases my credence in it …
I’m curious what is your relative credence in non-materialist, “idealistic” physicalism if you’re familiar with it? One contemporary account I’m most familiar with is David Pearce’s “physicalistic idealism” (“an experimentally testable conjecture” that “that reality is fundamentally experiential and that the natural world is exhaustively described by the equations of physics and their solutions”) (see also Pearce’s popular explanation of his views in a Quora post). David Hoffman’s “Consciousness Realism” would be another example (I haven’t looked deeply into his work).
One can argue that idealistic physicalism is more parsimonious (by being a monistic physicalism) and thus more likely to be true(r) than panpsychism (which assumes property dualism). Panpsychism, on the other hand, may be more intuitive and more familiar to researchers these days, which may explain why it’s discussed more(?) these days compared to non-materialist physicalism.
I’m curious what is your relative credence in non-materialist, “idealistic” physicalism if you’re familiar with it?
I’m not familiar enough with it to have much of a view, and I only skimmed. Correct me if I’m misundertanding, but my guess is that basically classical/non-quantum phenomena can be sufficient for consciousness, since the quantum stuff going on in our heads doesn’t seem that critical and could be individually replaced with “classical” interactions while preserving everything else in the brain as well as our behaviour. I would say substrate doesn’t matter and we can abstract away a lot of details, but some features of how interactions happen might matter (I’m not a computational functionalist).
panpsychism (which assumes property dualism)
I guess this is a matter of definitions, but I don’t think this is true, and as far as I can tell, non-materialist physicalism is also compatible with what many would recognize as panpsychism. I would call a theory panpsychist if it calls things like rocks, my desk, etc.. conscious. My post here doesn’t assume dualism in panpsychism, and is compatible with illusionism, e.g. it applies to attention schema theory.
… my guess is that basically classical/non-quantum phenomena can be sufficient for consciousness, since the quantum stuff going on in our heads doesn’t seem that critical and could be individually replaced with “classical” interactions while preserving everything else in the brain as well as our behaviour.
I’m not sure how to understand your “sufficient”, since to our best knowledge the world is quantum, and the classical physics is only an approximation. (Quoting Pearce: “Why expect a false theory of the world, i.e. classical physics, to yield a true account of consciousness?”.)
One reason Pearce needs quantum phenomena is the so-called binding problem of consciousness. For on Pearce’s account, “phenomenal binding is classically impossible.” IIRC the phenomenal binding is also what drives David Chalmers to dualism.
I would say substrate doesn’t matter …
It doesn’t matter indeed on a physicalistic idealist account. But currently, as far as we know, only brains support phenomenal binding (as opposed to being mere “psychotic noise”), for the reason of a huge evolutionary advantage (to the replicating genes).
… non-materialist physicalism is also compatible with what many would recognize as panpsychism …
I’m not sure how to understand your “sufficient”, since to our best knowledge the world is quantum, and the classical physics is only an approximation.
I agree, but I think exclusively quantum phenomena like superposition aren’t necessary in our account of consciousness; that’s a detail we can abstract away. I think we could make all the important phenomena happen on a macroscopic scale where classical physics can adequately describe what’s happening, e.g. use macroscopic balls instead of particles for signals.
Thanks for writing the post!
Since you write:
I’m curious what is your relative credence in non-materialist, “idealistic” physicalism if you’re familiar with it? One contemporary account I’m most familiar with is David Pearce’s “physicalistic idealism” (“an experimentally testable conjecture” that “that reality is fundamentally experiential and that the natural world is exhaustively described by the equations of physics and their solutions”) (see also Pearce’s popular explanation of his views in a Quora post). David Hoffman’s “Consciousness Realism” would be another example (I haven’t looked deeply into his work).
One can argue that idealistic physicalism is more parsimonious (by being a monistic physicalism) and thus more likely to be true(r) than panpsychism (which assumes property dualism). Panpsychism, on the other hand, may be more intuitive and more familiar to researchers these days, which may explain why it’s discussed more(?) these days compared to non-materialist physicalism.
I’m not familiar enough with it to have much of a view, and I only skimmed. Correct me if I’m misundertanding, but my guess is that basically classical/non-quantum phenomena can be sufficient for consciousness, since the quantum stuff going on in our heads doesn’t seem that critical and could be individually replaced with “classical” interactions while preserving everything else in the brain as well as our behaviour. I would say substrate doesn’t matter and we can abstract away a lot of details, but some features of how interactions happen might matter (I’m not a computational functionalist).
I guess this is a matter of definitions, but I don’t think this is true, and as far as I can tell, non-materialist physicalism is also compatible with what many would recognize as panpsychism. I would call a theory panpsychist if it calls things like rocks, my desk, etc.. conscious. My post here doesn’t assume dualism in panpsychism, and is compatible with illusionism, e.g. it applies to attention schema theory.
Thanks for the reply.
I’m not sure how to understand your “sufficient”, since to our best knowledge the world is quantum, and the classical physics is only an approximation. (Quoting Pearce: “Why expect a false theory of the world, i.e. classical physics, to yield a true account of consciousness?”.)
One reason Pearce needs quantum phenomena is the so-called binding problem of consciousness. For on Pearce’s account, “phenomenal binding is classically impossible.” IIRC the phenomenal binding is also what drives David Chalmers to dualism.
It doesn’t matter indeed on a physicalistic idealist account. But currently, as far as we know, only brains support phenomenal binding (as opposed to being mere “psychotic noise”), for the reason of a huge evolutionary advantage (to the replicating genes).
Good point. Thanks :)
I agree, but I think exclusively quantum phenomena like superposition aren’t necessary in our account of consciousness; that’s a detail we can abstract away. I think we could make all the important phenomena happen on a macroscopic scale where classical physics can adequately describe what’s happening, e.g. use macroscopic balls instead of particles for signals.