Elizabeth Fernandez (astrophysics) Wrote:In other words, our idea of reality — that there is a universal truth in observations, that we have freedom of choice, and that this choice cannot affect what happens in the past or at a distance — is not consistent with quantum mechanics.
So what did their experiment show? The number of correlations they saw was consistent with what quantum mechanics would predict.
The brain's presentation of and commonsense apprehension of reality (how it interprets information from various stimulated tissue types) SHOULD be inconsistent with or radically different from the non-biological source. Or at least if one is a strict materialist (of which anti-panpsychism should be an expected component -- i.e., the "universe is neither conscious nor constituted of psychological properties").
And yet most, if not all of us, seem to be implicit panpsychists -- and potentially become deniers of being such if/when we do become explicitly aware of the orientation and how it conflicts with a (strict) conventional conception of matter (yet we may still perversely find ourselves reflexively indulging panpsychism).
For instance... Verbally you can at least get believers in strict materialism to agree that the elimination of consciousness resulting from death involves all the manifested appearances of vision, hearing, feeling, etc disappearing -- and the cognitive discriminations and language-mediated conceptions that grappled with those phenomenal presentations also ceasing as activity. IOW, that "not even blankness" is what matter normally is to itself.
But in practice even the materialists simply don't adhere to that, or their commitment to whatever matter metaphysics or scientific realism they supposedly adhere to with respect to a radically different, "independent of mental representations" world that exists outside their heads.
Because nothing can be done with such "absence of everything", so the "shown" objects and events of consciousness still subtly creep back into the portrayal of that non-conscious brand of existence. (Or as an alternative, its disciplinary treatment is formally populated with abstract symbols and technical nomenclature, which are even more artificial and deliberate products. Plus, those likewise have to be manifested in some mode in order to be verified and useful.)
Similar to a church member being reverent and shouting hosannas during Sunday attendance, an advocate of scientific realism or applicable metaphysical realism can abide by their anti-panpsychism at times. But when engaging in affairs of the everyday world, it's back to contradictorily slash reflexively regarding a representation-independent and mind-independent world as not only still "showing itself" after death (or minus any living things in the universe) -- but differentiating, conceiving, and understanding itself the same as in the private thought narratives of human consciousness.
While the old article by Jesse Bering below primarily concerns the issue of death... The implications for non-conscious matter in general can be extracted from it, as well as the wayward implicit panpsychism people seem naively born with. Which we either remain verbally ignorant of, deny if finally realizing and being confronted by, or in a few [or many?] cases even come to accept as a personal view (including contingently, paradoxically accepting its rival, too).
Never Say Die: Why We Can't Imagine Death
https://www.scientificamerican.com/artic...r-say-die/
EXCERPT: The problem applies even to those who claim not to believe in an afterlife. As philosopher and Center for Naturalism founder Thomas W. Clark wrote in a 1994 article for the Humanist (emphases mine):
Here ... is the view at issue: When we die, what’s next is nothing; death is an abyss, a black hole, the end of experience; it is eternal nothingness, the permanent extinction of being. And here, in a nutshell, is the error contained in that view: It is to reify nothingness -- make it a positive condition or quality (for example, of “blackness”) -- and then to place the individual in it after death, so that we somehow fall into nothingness, to remain there eternally.
Consider the rather startling fact that you will never know you have died. You may feel yourself slipping away, but it isn’t as though there will be a “you” around who is capable of ascertaining that, once all is said and done, it has actually happened. Just to remind you, you need a working cerebral cortex to harbor propositional knowledge of any sort, including the fact that you’ve died—and once you’ve died your brain is about as phenomenally generative as a head of lettuce. In a 2007 article published in the journal Synthese, University of Arizona philosopher Shaun Nichols puts it this way: “When I try to imagine my own non-existence I have to imagine that I perceive or know about my non-existence. No wonder there’s an obstacle!”
This observation may not sound like a major revelation to you, but I bet you’ve never considered what it actually means, which is that your own mortality is unfalsifiable from the first-person perspective. This obstacle is why writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe allegedly remarked that “everyone carries the proof of his own immortality within himself.”
Even when we want to believe that our minds end at death, it is a real struggle to think in this way...