(Feb 29, 2024 05:05 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: [ -> ]Susan Schneider on panpsychism...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv1MIj0m9fY
Quote:I don't understand what the panpsychists mean when they claim that these little elements of reality are subjects of experience. [...] I think that there is a view that's like panpsychism ... That work, by the way, is within an area known as quantum gravity [pregeometry]. ... So even if there's nothing like time, and even if there's nothing like space, it would seem friendly to the idea that there's protospace and prototime. And if that's the case, that is quite friendly to a view that's known as panprotopsychism, which is, by definition, a view that says that the fundamental ingredients as they combine give rise to conscious experience, and that those fundamental ingredients are quasimental.
For those who aren't trying to mimic some aspect of Buddhism, "panprotopsychism" is probably closer to what they mean. But somewhere along the way they tend to drift off into using panpsychism again.
Lee Smolin: The problem of consciousness [phenomenal experience] is an aspect of the question of what the world really is. We don't know what a rock really is, or an atom, or an electron. We can only observe how they interact with other things and thereby describe their relational properties. Perhaps everything has external and internal aspects. The external properties are those that science can capture and describe through interactions, in terms of relationships. The internal aspect is the intrinsic essence; it is the reality that is not expressible in the language of interactions and relations. Consciousness, whatever it is, is an aspect of the intrinsic essence of brains. --Time Reborn ... page 270
IOW, matter has intrinsic states. It has a manner of being or of existing which the abstract descriptions and technical representations of physics (that are artificial) accordingly do not capture and express.
These intrinsic states may be phenomenal in some primitive respect (i.e., manifest), or they at least have the latent capacity for such. But "in the wild" or outside of brains they do not normally constitute psychological activity. They are not organized to simulate and identify and understand themselves and anything else. They are not regulated by a memory-based system that enables cognition and intellectual processes.
This is not really the view called panpsychism, since the root of "psych" in that term implies some if not all features and attributes of "mind". Again, these intrinsic states of matter would be
ontological, not psychological. The latter classification only pertains when matter has evolved into a peculiar kind of biological sophistication.
The brain or an equivalent functioning arrangement recruits and combines the intrinsic nature of matter to create elaborate sensations and thoughts that privately "show themselves" (manifest) within the performing system and its applicable processes.
There is no science for predicting what combinations of dynamic relationships would result in certain qualia being produced and the overall phenomenal images, sounds, odors, tactile feelings, etc that those qualia compose. Only by engineering a synthetic brain -- that truly had private experiences -- and could report about them, might there be a possibility of devising such a theory and field of study. Due to the synthetic brain being able to precisely communicate what changes it was experiencing as researchers tweaked and modified its structural activity and operations.
Michael Lockwood: Do we therefore have no genuine knowledge of the intrinsic character of the physical world? So it might seem. But, according to the line of thought I am now pursuing, we do, in a very limited way, have access to content in the material world as opposed merely to abstract casual structure, since there is a corner of the physical world that we know, not merely by inference from the deliverances of our five senses, but because we are that corner. It is the bit within our skulls, which we know by introspection. In being aware, for example, of the qualia that seemed so troublesome for the materialist, we glimpse the intrinsic nature of what, concretely, realizes the formal structure that a correct physics would attribute to the matter of our brains. In awareness, we are, so to speak, getting an insider's look at our own brain activity. --The Enigma of Sentience (1998)
Erwin Schrodinger: The world is a construct of our sensations, perceptions, memories. It is convenient to regard it as existing objectively on its own. But it certainly does not become manifest by its mere existence. Its becoming manifest is conditional on very special goings-on in very special parts of this very world, namely on certain events that happen in a brain. That is an inordinately peculiar kind of implication, which prompts the question: What particular properties distinguish these brain processes and enable them to produce the manifestation? Can we guess which material processes have this power, which not? Or simple: What kind of material process is directly associated with consciousness? --What is Life? Mind and Matter