Hot off the presses: two new articles on panpsychism.
"Panpsychism and Panprotopsychism" formulates what I call the Hegelian argument for panpsychism: arguing for it as a synthesis resulting from the thesis of materialism (especially the causal argument for materialism) and the antithesis of dualism (especially the conceivability argument for dualism). It also distinguishes numerous varieties of panpsychism, contrasts panpsychism and panprotopsychism, and examines problems for both. This article (when finalized) will be published as the Amherst Lecture in Philosophy and also probably in a volume on Russellian monism edited by Torin Alter and Yujin Nagasawa.
"The Combination Problem for Panpsychism" is an attempt at a systematic treatment of the combination problem: how does panpsychist microexperience add up to the macroexperience we know and love? I articulate a number of different subproblems here, try to turn them into arguments against panpsychism and panprotopsychism, and examine various proposals for answering them. This article will probably eventually appear in a collection on panpsychism edited by Godehard Bruntrup and Ludwig Jaskolla.
Together these articles are my best attempts to articulate the case for and against pan(proto)psychism. They're extremely drafty for now and any feedback would be welcome.
I very much enjoyed both pieces.
It seems to me that we know neural systems can generate qualia and valence. The characteristic quality of neural systems is frequency. Frequency can spawn many levels of abstraction, and may be argued to be, if not a fundamental property of reality, a rather close fit. All of the 'emergent' examples you provide seem to ultimately piggyback on frequency dynamics. The concept of a panpsychism based on frequency (as many seem to be) might be worth a mention.
Perhaps this is ad-hoc justification for the hypothesis I sent you a while back, however.
Posted by: Mike Johnson | March 26, 2013 at 11:00 AM
Thanks for this. Elijah
Posted by: Elijah Armstrong | March 26, 2013 at 02:03 PM
I really like the ‘combination problem’ paper. It’s useful to have all these different discussions, which often raise different problems, drawn together and organised, and I think I agree with you on most of the substantive judgements.
I was wondering, though, about how the classification presented here relates to the three elements of the grain problem that Lockwood distinguishes – you talk a lot about the ‘palette problem’ and the ‘mismatch problem’, which connect pretty directly to two of them, but the third element (the apparent lack of detail in macrophenomenology compared to the fantastic detail of microphysics and anything directly corresponding to it), doesn't come out so clearly.
Are you seeing this ‘lack of detail’ issue as just an aspect of the mismatch problem, or as more or less equivalent to what you've called the ‘revelation argument’ (I've been inclined towards the latter view)? Also, you suggest a response to the revelation argument in section 4, but don’t seem to mention it again in section 5. Should this be taken to mean you don’t think it’s a very serious problem?
On the subject of the mismatch problem, here’s one thing that makes me think its difficulty may be over-stated. Usual ways of expressing it involve comparing the structure of experience to the structure of the brain. But this seems like a mistake even apart from physical-vs.-phenomenal considerations, because experience is an event or process while the brain is a stable enduring object.
The appropriate thing to compare experience to is brain activity, and it’s much less obvious (to me at least) that the structure of brain activity doesn't match that of experience. Insofar as there’s an obvious answer to ‘how is brain activity structured?’, it seems like the best candidate is ‘as a mass of information flows’, and the particular sorts of flow involved seem to correspond pretty directly to what sort of experiences are being had. This doesn't show that the structures are isomorphic but for me it removes the sense that they’re obviously discrepant.
Posted by: Luke Roelofs | March 26, 2013 at 03:43 PM