smcder
Paranormal Adept
So why the illusion? Why would consciousness have a Big Bang ... you know, when it could like, chill man?
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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 9
- Thread starter Gene Steinberg
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So why the illusion? Why would consciousness have a Big Bang ... you know, when it could like, chill man?
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
For the same reason that matter would have a Big Bang. Which is to say who knows.So why the illusion? Why would consciousness have a Big Bang ... you know, when it could like, chill man?
smcder
Paranormal Adept
Can you just sum it up?
smcder
Paranormal Adept
Then how do we overcome it so that we can transcend time and space?
smcder
Paranormal Adept
I don't think that's quite right. Physics offers a story consistent with known forces and properties. And vice-versa ... known forces and properties point to a singularity. But consciousness as fundamental doesn't point to any material events as they are illusory. So the Big Bang would be illusory.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
Conscious Agents should know.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
"The ontologic framework of Fundamental Awareness proposed here assumes that non-dual Awareness is foundational to the universe, not arising from the interactions or structures of higher level phenomena. The framework allows comparison and integration of views from the three investigative domains concerned with understanding the nature of consciousness: science, philosophy, and metaphysics. In this framework, Awareness is the underlying reality, not reducible to anything else. Awareness and existence are the same. As such, the universe is non-material, self-organizing throughout, a holarchy of complementary, process driven, recursive interactions. The universe is both its own first observer and subject. Considering the world to be non-material and comprised, a priori, of Awareness is to privilege information over materiality, action over agency and to understand that qualia are not a “hard problem,” but the foundational elements of all existence. These views fully reflect main stream Western philosophical traditions, insights from culturally diverse contemplative and mystical traditions, and are in keeping with current scientific thinking, expressible mathematically."
What does it mean here to be non-material? We've talked about this before - the peculiarity that we cant seem to talk about the non-material except in negation.
If consciousness isn't the opposite of materiality then why don't we have a distinct word for the non-material?
What does it mean here to be non-material? We've talked about this before - the peculiarity that we cant seem to talk about the non-material except in negation.
If consciousness isn't the opposite of materiality then why don't we have a distinct word for the non-material?
smcder
Paranormal Adept
Can these views be classed as "conscious reductivist" views? If so, we need to be prepared to defend them from challenges to reductionism.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
Fascinating! This ties in with a movement in robotics BEAM and Dreyfus' Heidiggerean critique of GOFAI.
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
1) But physics, so far, does not incorporate consciousness.
2) The forces and properties may be all here is. There may be no matter there. It's forces and properties all the waaaaay down and all the way up.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
The last half dozen paragraphs are dynamite.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
Both theories are inadequate in isomorphic ways. Until either shows even promise of making ground on their hard problem we should put them aside and see what else there is to say about consciousness.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
smcder
Paranormal Adept
By the way, I really like saying "isomorphic".
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
We'll just have to disagree. I think both theories (materialism and idealism) have their problems, but disagree that they are isomorphic.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
Patrick Mellor
Academia.edu
Patrick Mellor | San Francisco State University - Academia.edu
Abstract
Panpsychism, the view that phenomenal perception is a fundamental property of the universe, is one of the oldest theories in philosophy of mind. While it may seem counter-intuitive at first glance, panpsychism deftly avoids many of the glaring problems in the various forms of dualism and materialism. The central challenge to panpsychism is the combination problem: How to integrate fundamental units of conscious experience, which is usually considered an indivisible property, into one larger individual subject; in other words, how to form a macro-subject from micro-subjects. Several authors consider the combination problem to be insurmountable, and to require a retreat from a strong panphsychist view to a neutral monism. I argue that a reappraisal of the work of Leibniz in this area gives an informative perspective on this problem, and moves us further toward its dissolution.
Academia.edu
Patrick Mellor | San Francisco State University - Academia.edu
Abstract
Panpsychism, the view that phenomenal perception is a fundamental property of the universe, is one of the oldest theories in philosophy of mind. While it may seem counter-intuitive at first glance, panpsychism deftly avoids many of the glaring problems in the various forms of dualism and materialism. The central challenge to panpsychism is the combination problem: How to integrate fundamental units of conscious experience, which is usually considered an indivisible property, into one larger individual subject; in other words, how to form a macro-subject from micro-subjects. Several authors consider the combination problem to be insurmountable, and to require a retreat from a strong panphsychist view to a neutral monism. I argue that a reappraisal of the work of Leibniz in this area gives an informative perspective on this problem, and moves us further toward its dissolution.
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smcder
Paranormal Adept
Do you understand what I mean by isomorphic?
smcder
Paranormal Adept
TOWARD AN ELEGANT PANPSYCHISM: LEIBNIZ'S MONADOLOGY AND THE COMBINATION PROBLEM Patrick Mellor
Academia.edu
Patrick Mellor | San Francisco State University - Academia.edu
"These six arguments share a common observation; that many forms of what William James termed “mind-dust 28 ” panpsychism assert the building up of macrosubjects from microsubjects as a brute fact, and thus suffer from the same explanatory gap as emergentist physicalism. It is no accident that these arguments are reiterations of the arguments against physicalism that substitute microphenomenal qualities for physical properties. The fundamental insight of panpsychism is that, in order for our experienced phenomenal consciousness and our observation of objective properties of the physical world to cohere without paradox, phenomenal qualities must be integrated into the structure of the world rather than held separate, declared illusory, or restricted to extremely narrow bounds such as human brains. Our goal must be to integrate this insight into a philosophy of mind that does not fall into similar quagmires as emergentist physicalism.
*The assumption of constitutive panpsychism that macrosubjects must be built up from systems of microsubjects is an assumption stemming from an instinctually physicalist worldview.
It erroneously conflates physical properties and phenomenal qualities as two sets of attributes that can be ascribed to various components of the world in a similar manner. Talk of electrons having a phenomenal quality associated with charge, protons presumably having a different phenomenal quality associated with the strong force, and so on, stems from a category mistake and an attempt to force a one to one mapping relation between two incommensurable sets. In other words, there is no bijective relation between basic physical properties and basic phenomenal qualities. Once we let go of this requirement, we can begin to escape the inherited physicalist strictures which lead to the combination problem."
Sent from my LGLS991 using Tapatalk
Academia.edu
Patrick Mellor | San Francisco State University - Academia.edu
"These six arguments share a common observation; that many forms of what William James termed “mind-dust 28 ” panpsychism assert the building up of macrosubjects from microsubjects as a brute fact, and thus suffer from the same explanatory gap as emergentist physicalism. It is no accident that these arguments are reiterations of the arguments against physicalism that substitute microphenomenal qualities for physical properties. The fundamental insight of panpsychism is that, in order for our experienced phenomenal consciousness and our observation of objective properties of the physical world to cohere without paradox, phenomenal qualities must be integrated into the structure of the world rather than held separate, declared illusory, or restricted to extremely narrow bounds such as human brains. Our goal must be to integrate this insight into a philosophy of mind that does not fall into similar quagmires as emergentist physicalism.
*The assumption of constitutive panpsychism that macrosubjects must be built up from systems of microsubjects is an assumption stemming from an instinctually physicalist worldview.
It erroneously conflates physical properties and phenomenal qualities as two sets of attributes that can be ascribed to various components of the world in a similar manner. Talk of electrons having a phenomenal quality associated with charge, protons presumably having a different phenomenal quality associated with the strong force, and so on, stems from a category mistake and an attempt to force a one to one mapping relation between two incommensurable sets. In other words, there is no bijective relation between basic physical properties and basic phenomenal qualities. Once we let go of this requirement, we can begin to escape the inherited physicalist strictures which lead to the combination problem."
Sent from my LGLS991 using Tapatalk
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smcder
Paranormal Adept
TOWARD AN ELEGANT PANPSYCHISM: LEIBNIZ'S MONADOLOGY AND THE COMBINATION PROBLEM Patrick Mellor
Academia.edu
Patrick Mellor | San Francisco State University - Academia.edu
"This is not to deny that simple physical systems do have simple associated phenomenal qualities, and more complex physical systems, more complex phenomenal qualities, but the latter are not built up from the former in a simple combinatorial manner. In order to see how this could work, we must transition from a view of phenomenal qualities as appendages of physical properties to seeing observed physical properties as perspectival consequences of the phenomenal qualities of components of the world, whether simple or complex. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, in The Monadology, is to my knowledge the first person to explain why we must do this and describe how we might go about it, and his work here has great relevance to current panpsychism."
Academia.edu
Patrick Mellor | San Francisco State University - Academia.edu
"This is not to deny that simple physical systems do have simple associated phenomenal qualities, and more complex physical systems, more complex phenomenal qualities, but the latter are not built up from the former in a simple combinatorial manner. In order to see how this could work, we must transition from a view of phenomenal qualities as appendages of physical properties to seeing observed physical properties as perspectival consequences of the phenomenal qualities of components of the world, whether simple or complex. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, in The Monadology, is to my knowledge the first person to explain why we must do this and describe how we might go about it, and his work here has great relevance to current panpsychism."
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