PanPsychism

Context: OnConsciousness

The position that everything is "conscious" to some extent.

The attraction, as I see it, (and I feel the strength of this argument), is that if everything has a little bit of consciousness, you don't have to try to solve the knotty problem of figuring out which physical systems give rise to consciousness vs. those that don't. Or the even harder problem of explaining WHY some physical systems should and others shouldn't.

That's a pretty strong argument IMHO. It removes a unsolved (and perhaps insoluble) problem from our metaphysics.

The good counter argument is that we haven't really removed the problem. Because even if we buy that rocks and electrons have consciousness, what about arbitrary disjunctions? Eg. my left leg and Alpha Centauri. Is it also like something to be that disjunction?

That seems even more counter-intuitive than "rocks" being conscious. But if this disjunction is not conscious it just brings the same problem back. Now we say that physical things that have some kind of unity (eg. human bodies) have consciousness but that things that lack that unity don't. But this just reintroduces a dichotomy of physical systems that do give rise to consciousness and physical systems that don't. What notions of "unity" count? And why?

Once you have that dichotomy, and are struggling to explain it, you have lost the thing that panpsychism bought you in the first place. After all Alpha Centauri does exert a little bit of gravity on my left leg. So it's not the case that this lack of unity is to do with total absence of physical causation. So now we have to say that the electrical causation between neurons in my brain is the "right kind" but the gravitational attraction of Alpha Centauri on my left leg is the "wrong kind". And if there are right kinds and wrong kinds, then the rock may have the wrong kind too.

Contrast :

• TheChadAnimist