(May 28, 2018 10:20 PM)Ostronomos Wrote: [ -> ]. . . And so panpsychism would be understood as the primary existence prior to the physical world and is isomorphic to our natures. [...]
Panpsychism could potentially be described without mental terminology. Since the "experience" aspect of consciousness would amount to upper-stratum manipulation of the actual "intrinsic stuff" of be-ing (whether the "upper-stratum" is neural tissue, electronic components, hydraulic valve networks, etc).
And the cognition aspect of consciousness would reduce down to the extrinsic structure and "capacity for action" fundamentals found throughout the cosmos which humans
can successfully map at the higher levels. (I.e., intellect and memory are just more mechanistic relationships in a complex, specialized package of functions). An overall world "map of causal connections" then being the conceptual construct which abstract (as opposed to phenomenal) meanings of "physical" effectively rest on.
Frank Jackson (1998), Rae Langton (1998) and David Lewis (2009) also advocate views similar to ESR [Epistemic Structural Realism]. ... Peter Unger (2001) also argues that our knowledge of the world is purely structural and that qualia are the non-structural components of reality. Frank Jackson argues that science only reveals the causal / relational properties of physical objects, and that “we know next to nothing about the intrinsic nature of the world. We know only its causal cum relational nature” (1998: 24). Langton argues that science only reveals the extrinsic properties of physical objects, and both then argue that their intrinsic natures, and hence the intrinsic nature of the world, are epistemically inaccessible. Jackson points out that this inference can be blocked if the natures of objects and their intrinsic properties are identified with their relational or extrinsic properties, but argues that this makes a mystery of what it is that stands in the causal relations. Lewis' structuralism is based on the centrality he gives to the Ramsey sentence reconstruction of scientific theories that is the subject of the next section. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/struct...sm/#KanESR
Quote:[...] we are provided with a failsafe against fatality. [...]
If a believer in such,
scientific realism would provide that even for the atheist or philosophical naturalist[*] It's just that many people aren't really satisfied with the life they have between this particular biological conception and death being alone what endures perpetually for them. They want to keep on going (or feel like they're illusorily flowing or moving anyway) to some "different life" which they don't currently know about.
But personal evidence for "this particular identity I have now" extending beyond the set boundaries of "this particular life" depends upon memory being retained or surviving. Which seems highly unlikely if continuance rests purely on a
generic subjectivity or primal experiencing underlying all these discrete instances of viewing ourselves as individuals that are distinct from each other.
For instance: Tom Parks is never going to consider himself also being Sandra Rowe and countless other people throughout history when the only information his experiences and cognitive acts revolve around is what his "current" brain / body has legitimate access to (the local environment). The same reason is why Tom Parks at age ten doesn't consider himself to be Tom Parks at age 35. The younger version has no access to the information of the older version and his world / era; the latter thereby cannot be manifested as "immediately or empirically real" in the perceptions and thoughts of the former. Tom Parks at age ten is permanently stuck in that segment of his identity; he can't be anyone else (including his future selves) and have confirming evidence for it.
On the flip-side, while Tom Parks at age 35 does have memories of being age 10 in the past -- he doesn't have access to all the information necessarily for processing and generating manifestations of that younger version of himself and its world in an empirically real context (only privately, in flawed imagination or activation of eroded memories). Even if he could magically do so, the circumstances of his own immediate public environment would swiftly intrude upon that of the other ("get out of way of falling tree cut down by chainsaw"). He'd be diagnosed as insane, experiencing two different worlds / stages of his identity imposing on each other. Which is why any so-called "general consciousness" would have to maintain those distinctions and the isolation of individuals from each other to begin with -- why the very possibility of experience would demand a regulating space/time template or "principles for maintaining incremental differentiation" to conform to, to keep them separate.
- - - footnote - - -
[*]
Paul Davies:
"Peter Lynds's reasonable and widely accepted assertion that the flow of time is an illusion (25 October, p 33) does not imply that time itself is an illusion. It is perfectly meaningful to state that two events may be separated by a certain duration, while denying that time mysteriously flows from one event to the other. Crick compares our perception of time to that of space. Quite right. Space does not flow either, but it's still 'there'." --New Scientist, 6 December 2003, Sec. Letters
