The idea behind panpsychism is that consciousness is not something that brains create but that matter itself is conscious to some degree. Matter by itself is not as conscious as that generated by the brain but conscious nonetheless, even to a tiny degree.
If we do accept this premise then the process of abiogenesis starts to make sense and seems a very logical outcome, that is the emergence of complex life we see today.
I’m sure we will run into the problem of what is or constitutes consciousness at this point for how could an atom be conscious? We simply cannot answer this question in the traditional sense that we could answer or account for our own everyday consciousness which relates to memory, presentness, awareness, thinking etc.
So we don’t really have any proof that panpsychism is true but do we need proof here? I don’t think we do at all, what we do need however is a better definition of consciousness.
If we take for granted a “universal time” and understand “reality” as “running along this universal time,” then we are almost already stuck with some kind of dualism.
We assume that “consciousness” emerges from “non-consciousness stuff” at some t_0.
Can consciousness explain abiogenesis ? I’d say not scientifically. Your consciousness is not a “thing” in the world. That’s my view. My consciousness is not a thing. Science explains public events in terms of other public events. It often uses “community clock time” as a pseudo-spatial numerical dimension. This encourages philosophers to uncritically understand time as a real number. Time is understood to “run outside” of all consciousness. If you presuppose an “objective reality” that is “outside of all consciousness,” then you have quietly made a massive ontological commitment that is hard to even notice as such— because it is so common and dominant.
Animism ties into panphysicialism and under certain models this is possible through materialization. You see this concept in action in movies and sci-fi books, but the idea is exactly what you are expressing. You are transforming energy into physical matter spontaneously. In order to do this theoretically you would have to have control of every building block which would include the atoms and cells. We lack the technology in the 20th century to do this on most of our earths of course and no one has proven that they possess the supernatural abilities or are staying in the shadows and avoiding the mainstream audience.
My guess is we are thousands of years away from this technology blossoming and becoming public.
I am a panpsychist. There are at least a couple others here. To some degree, our definitions are different. So I can only speak for myself.
I do not think consciousness is what you think it is. I do not think there are different degrees of consciousness. I think everything is conscious. But nothing can be conscious of anything but its own existence, its own nature. An electron is as conscious as I am. But an electron does not have information processing systems, sense organs, and feedback loops like I do. So it cannot experience them as things like thinking, awareness, and emotions. It is only conscious of what an electron can be conscious of, its own nature.
I don’t pretend to have any idea of what an electron’s consciousness could be like. The electron doesn’t have any idea, either, of course. An electron’s consciousness isn’t meaningful in any way I can imagine, and I can’t imagine it serving any purpose, or having any effect on the electron.
A legitimate question now would be, Why even suggest such a thing? It’s because I do not, as @j_j just worded it, ‘assume that “consciousness” emerges from “non-consciousness stuff” at some t_0.’ We have no evidence to support the idea, and I don’t think it makes sense.
If we’re assuming panpsychism, for the sake of argument, as I guess you’re doing with your OP, then I’m sure an argument can be made that it could have played a role in abiogenesis. Some think consciousness plays a role in the evolution of life, once you have life, and once consciousness comes along in life. If consciousness is present before life, then it could possibly play the same role in non-living systems, also. Once there is a physical system that processes information, maybe consciousness could do for it what some say it does for life, until it has a system that’s complex enough to be considered alive. Since the definition of life is as uncertain as the definition of consciousness, it’s difficult to know where the point of complexity is.
Abiogenesis is not about emergence of complex life we see today. It’s about emergence of dirt simple life from non-life. For panpsychism to explain that, it needs to explain regular non-living matter somehow wanting (and succeeding) to rearrange itself into a simple life form. It would need deliberate agency, or volition to do that.
Sans such an explanation, it’s just a hypothesis lacking in evidence. This is true of just about any view. I think panpsychism attempts to avoid the emergence of consciousness by refusing to acknowledge that it was ever absent, sort of like those that get around first cause by refusing to acknowledge a first anything.
What’s the point of positing the consciousness of an electron if it has no effect? How is an electron with this ‘property’ in any way distinct from one lacking it? If no difference, how it is a property?
I am glad we agree on this point. I can’t relate to panpsychism personally because I don’t understand “consciousness” to refer to a stuff in the world.
I agree. I can only think of it as a capacity. Not that I can get terribly clear about what that means. Maybe some day. But what about mass? Who can deny that mass is a fundamental property? But is mass a stuff? That seems like an odd thought. Brian Greene doesn’t know what mass is. Regarding the question of what he calls proto-consciousness, and the lack of an answer as to what it is, he says:
A guy who knows as much about physics as he does can measure mass and charge more precisely than most people can even understand, but he doesn’t know what they are. If we can accept not knowing what they are, but can accept that they are not stuff, then I don’t have a problem being equally uncertain about consciousness.
The line between living and non living things is not so easily drawn. Are viruses living things? Are self replicating molecules living things? The line seems somewhat arbitrary and is often drawn based on self referential definitions.
In this sense it resembles drawing the line between experiential (consciousness carries connotations of self referential awareness, which I think is rare) and non experiential entities. The line is arbitrary.
Some say experience is an emergent property from non experiential matter.
Some say life emergences from and depends on non living molecules.
My tendency is to prefer monistic instead of dualistic or pluralistic ontologies.
So the capacity for life and the capacity for consciousness are in some sense built into the very foundations of nature. I think the limitations of language allow for only a vague description of how this could be. The language I use is that of process philosophy and its entailed protopanyschism (prehension). So no, panpsychism does not explain abiogenesis, but they are problems which share certain metaphysical and ontological features.
Abiogenesis is the process that has led to current complex life. We’re both on the same page though despite this disagreement on the definition of abiogenesis.
as for the emergence of life from non-life the issue is with the definition of what makes something alive. Panpsychism’s view is that everything is alive including mud, pebbles or just water.
in early earth, underwater or above it, there’s been said to be that conditions were such that heat input allowed the new combination of different substances to form ever increasing chain reactions ultimately leading to self replication through rna.
So whilst there might not have been volition of primordial matter to come alive as it were by itself, external conditions lead to this transformation anyway.
That notion that everything is alive is more properly termed “hylozoism”. The primary concept is “life” or “living” not consciousness, experience or awareness. It is close to animism and many indigenous peoples’ world view of every tree, rock and stream possessing a living spirit.
Panpsychism is more concerned with mind, mental properties, experience, awareness and ultimately consciousness. Since there is no agreed upon definition of consciousness (in common usage). I restrict consciousness to the kind of self aware self reflective inner subjective experience humans and higher animals might possess. It is not the claim of panpsychism that all “real” entities possess this kind of mental quality. The claim is more restricted to a primitive form of experience (usually the concept of non conscious experience). Higher forms of mentality require more complex structures and integrated information processing as found for example in the nervous systems of higher animals.
Rocks, puddles, bodies of water as simple aggregates have no form of integrated experience. The panpsychist claim is more along the lines that the fundamental units of these aggregates possess a very primitive form of psychic experience (non conscious). In the type of panpsychism I subscribe to ,this type of mentality is required for events to participate in the flow of reality (the process) of passage from past, present to future and the development of novelty and creativity. Not easy to explain or illustrate in the confined structure of the forum.
I prefer the term panexperientialism (Griffin) and the kind of panpsychism derived from the process philosophy of A.N. Whitehead. The usual retort is the kind of examples you are giving that stones or puddles or water are “conscious” which sounds silly to most even to me. That is not the claim of panpsychism.
I like that you bring in Greene. To me the issue here is what “is” is. The “problem of being” is not like other problems. Or it is at the basis of every other problem.
There are many reasonable approaches to parsing the sign “consciousness.” My own take is that the strongest and most fascinating approach is to understand it as a synonym of “being” or “presence” or “quality.” But “being” is not a stuff, not “what the world is made of.”
The world is “here.” Lots of kinds of things are “here.” But that “here-ness” of things is not itself another thing or stuff that is here. Things with “mass” are here. We assign them a “mass” based on their quality in relation to the quality of other things.
We can “run around the circle,” explaining mice in terms of cats and cheese. But “finally” the cat and the mouse and the cheese are “here,” each in a different “way” or with a different “quality.” My mom is conscious ( I call her “conscious”) because the cat and the mouse and the cheese are also “there” for her. The world that I have from “here” is the same world that she has over “there.” The “consciousness” of the other person is the “presence” (being) of our shared world from their POV rather than mine.
But my view will likely sound like nonsense if one is committed to a vision of subjects as “containers” of “inside stuff.” And also if one is committed to a “true” reality from “no point of view at all.”
For some reason, that post seems to give me a better hint of what you’ve been saying than any of your other posts. But I suspect I’m still a long way off, because I’m wondering if the cat and mouse are “there” for the cheese.
My own take is that not every entity is a “site of the world’s disclosure.” Only “sentient” objects have a world that is “there” for them.
But my view seems to require a complete rethinking of time and the structure of objects. It’s not really “my” view. I found it in the margins of the tradition. On the other hand, Heidegger is famous, as if Hegel, and this is how I tend to understand both of them.
You can have psychical interpretations of the world that don’t detail all matter as conscious on some level.
It’s quite simple actually. Like the Hard Problem of Consciousness is merely a self created problem by perceiving “willing” as a phenomenon that occurs from the top down. But let us consider here… “I will DO that” theres an attraction or repulsion from doing something, and yet Energy is the ability to DO work… and energy expresses itself with power which power manifests through resistance.
Energy ia fundamental to life. And so is perspective, which also occurs before life. Atoms and energies ans blah blah interact with each other all the time.
This is what Nietzsche’s calls the “Will to Power” which he details as the inner character of energy.
There’s an alternative to panpsychism called biopsychism. It differs from panpsychism in that is says that consciousness is an attribute of organic life but not of matter.
Panpsychism (Goff, Strawson): For panpsychists, mind has no boundary; it is universal. Mind-stuff (experientiality or proto-consciousness) is a fundamental feature of the universe, existing at the level of quarks and electrons. Strawson famously argues that if we want to avoid the “magic” of radical emergence, consciousness must be there from the very bottom up.
Biopsychism (Thompson, Varela): For enactivists, mind is bounded by life. Consciousness is not a cosmic building block; it manifests only when matter organizes itself into autopoietic (self-maintaining) wholes. Evan Thompson argues for the “Life-Mind Continuity Thesis” —where there is life, there is mind, but where there is no life, there is only passive physical mechanism.
The difference is simply that a rock or a mineral doesn’t do anything to maintain its identity in distinction from the sorrounding environment. It will be changed by whatever physical or chemical forces act on it. Whereas any organism has to maintain itself apart from the environment.
For any non-living aggregate — a stone, a drop of water, a crystal — whatever unity it possesses is borrowed either from our perception of unity, or from a temporary concurrence of forces. Nothing matters to a boulder sitting on the side of a hill. It does nothing to preserve itself, but is simply acted upon by the surrounding environment, from which it has no real distinction (except perhaps for an observer who is able to single it out).
But in living things something novel appears: systems that are unities for their own sake, by their own activity, sustained in existence by themselves. Form here is not the result of material organisation — it is its cause. Jonas describes this as an ontological surprise. The organism doesn’t simply have a form; it enacts form against entropy. This active self-integration is what gives real meaning to the concept of ipseity (being a subject of experience). It is not simply a phenomenological unity but an ontological one: a being whose existence is its own continuous achievement ~ Is the Mind Cause or Consequence (Wayfarer, Philosophy Today).
My view of Galen Strawson is that he needs to rescue physicalism, because he’s committed to the physicalist paradigm (everything real is ultimately physical). But he also recognises that it’s impossible to deny the reality of consciousness —ergo the physical must be (somehow) conscious!
Whereas Hans Jonas ('The Phenomenon of Life) says that life is an ‘ontological surprise’ — it differs in principle from inorganic matter. Physicalism however can’t allow for such distinctions, because they’re not reducible.
This is a good question. This is also a major problem. There is no uniform definition of such terms and no uniform usage of them in these discussions. What about. aware, or experience, or alert. At one time only humans were considered to be sentient or have experience. Now most, especially people who work with animals, attribute experience and sentience to animals. Some use the term “consciousness” for all forms of psychic or mental experience. Others feel only humans have the kind of self aware, self introspective kinds of thought that constitute “consciousness” and then there are terms life “subconscious” or “unconscious” and levels of consciousness and coma.
Ultimately all the elements and all physical structures are formed from more fundamental “entities” and fundamental forces in various combinations and configurations. It is put forth that in a similar fashion all forms of mind or experience could be constructed from more fundamental kinds of mental properties.
There is a combination problem for the physical world just as there is a combination problem for the psychical world. I am a neutral monist so there is only one basic ontology but it has both physical and psychic properties or poles which can not be separated from each other.
For me, yeah. I use consciousness for any kind of “presence of the world for.” It doesn’t need to be linguistic. Maybe ants are “conscious” in this sense. I am confident that dogs are. I don’t pretend to “prove” this or that. Largely I try to excavate the beliefs that I already live. And I try to find the best grip I can on fundamental terms. Like it seems to me that one of the most important meanings of “sentience” or “consciousness” is “presence of world.” For this is how we can share empirical objects. So this is needed for science to make sense.