Does panpsychism explain abiogenesis?

[Gnomon]

@invicta

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.

Yes. Science has found no signs of Life or Consciousness in the universe until the last few millennia. So it seems that Panpsychism does need a new definition of Psyche1 that accounts for the late emergence of sentient & sapient creatures. Etymologically, the term refers, metaphorically, to an immaterial Spirit or Soul or invisible Breath. So, it would have no properties accessible to modern Science.

That’s why I looked for something else, related to Consciousness, but that fits the Pan- (universal) requirement, without the religious implications of Soul. What I found was Energy in the form of Active Information and Governed Causation. So, I coined a neologism to encapsulate the “something else” that animates and awakens ordinary matter : EnFormAction2.

Since those terms are probably not familiar to most of us, I’ll just refer to this universal force as Energy. And we all know that Einstein defined Energy as the ability to transform from zippy Light into staid Matter. So, I think of it as a shapeshifter.

In my thesis, I carry that metaphor into an explanation for the evolution of Raw Energy (Big Bang) into Plasma, then Particles, then Stars, then Galaxies, then Planets . . . then eventually into a planet suitable for Animated Matter (Life), and finally into Thinking Matter (Mind). And only the last few decades of evolution have produced animals that think about thinking, and possess a self-concept.

So, the late-bloomer phenomenon we call Consciousness is not in any sense Universal, because it has been found only on the cusp of an ordinary galaxy. And is only Spiritual (Soulful) in the sense that it is invisible & intangible, yet always associated with the phenomenon of Life.

However, if anything in this Cosmos is Universal, it’s Energy. And modern science has found that it has transformed from the Pure Energy of the Bang, into the complexity of reflexive Consciousness. Therefore, I associate the Pan- of PanPsychism with universal Causation, not with breath or wind.

.
1. The psyche is the total structure of the human mind, which includes all conscious and unconscious thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
The word comes from an ancient Greek term meaning soul, spirit, or breath.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=Psyche

2. The EnFormAction Hypothesis :
That neologism is an analysis and re-synthesis of the common word for the latent power of mental contents : “Information”. “En” stands for energy, the physical power to cause change; “Form” refers to Platonic Ideals that become real; “Action” is the meta-physical power of transformation, as exemplified in the amazing metamorphoses of physics, whereby one kind of thing becomes a new kind of thing, with novel properties. In the Enformationism worldview, EnFormAction is eternal creative potential in action : it’s how creation-via-evolution works.
https://bothandblog3.enformationism.info/page23.html

[prothero]

@Gnomon

1. The psyche is the total structure of the human mind, which includes all conscious and unconscious thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
The word comes from an ancient Greek term meaning soul, spirit, or breath.
Google Search

There is of course the integrated information theory of consciousness of Tononi and others.

Whitehead writes a lot about “feeling” as a primitive form of experience or awareness see:

http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=1309

There is also the notion of perception in the mode of causal efficacy

http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=1274

I find Shaviro to be excellent in his simplification of both these concepts and their relevance to panpsychism and philosophy of mind (a more general term than consciousness). Mind in nature. Ultimately of course it is all energy but elucidating that conception requires much more work.

[Patterner]

@prothero

but most panpsychists would assert that some form of mind precedes life (as typically defined) .

Not this panpsychist. Because I don’t think mind and consciousness are the same thing, or even related.

@prothero

I take issue with the assertion that “panpsychism would hold that the rocks on Mars were conscious” as this is a proposition that almost no serious or scholarly proponent would assert.

I resemble that remark! Ok, three way that’s phrased, no.

@prothero

Rocks and other simple aggregates would not have any form of integrated information or experience whereas the individual components elements of the rock would be held to have some form of primitive subjective individual experience (usually a form of primitive experience unlike any type of human consciousness).

That’s perfectly said.

@prothero

Again terminology in the philosophy of mind is a bit of a problem (shambles).

Please don’t spread that around. They are trying to keep it a secret.

[prothero]

@Patterner

Not this panpsychist. Because I don’t think mind and consciousness are the same thing, or even related.

Expound. You may think of mind as matter or brain? I think of mind as a more general category of mental operations encompassing (experience, awareness, sentience, consciousness). Again that pesky little terminology, definition and meaning problem..

[Patterner]

@prothero

Expound

I think the mind is the act of thinking. An activity. If there is no thinking taking place, there is no mind.

To be a little more specific, I don’t think all of the brain’s activity is thinking.

In Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness, Patrick House writes:

Generally, though not in every case, each of the nineteen “ways” in this book promotes the idea that the brain evolved for, is itself, and will always be dedicated to movement. The best reason to start there is the simple, physical, and verifiable fact that a human brain’s only outputs are the muscles it connects to, whether the small ones that dart the eyes back and forth or the lumbering thigh muscles that kick-start a walk. No matter what goes into a brain, only movement ever comes out.

House says the only output of a brain is the physical movement it causes.

In I of the Vortex, Rodolfo Llinás writes about the “sea squirt”:

The adult form of this creature is sessile, rooted by its pedicle to a stable object in the sea. The sea squirt carries out two basic functions in its life: it feeds by filtering seawater, and it reproduces by budding. The larval form is briefly free-swimming (usually a day or less) and is equipped with a brainlike ganglion containing approximately 300 cells. This primitive nervous system receives sensory information about the surrounding environment through a statocyst (organ of balance), a rudimentary, light-sensitive patch of skin, and a notochord (primitive spinal cord). These features allow this tadpole-like creature to handle the vicissitudes of the ever-changing world within which it swims. Upon finding a suitable substrate the larva proceeds to bury its head into the selected location and becomes sessile once again. Once reattached to a stationary object the larva absorbs—literally digests—most of its own brain, including its notochord. It also digests its tail and tail musculature, thereupon regressing to the rather primitive adult stage: sessile and lacking a true nervous system other than that required for activation of the simple filtering activity. The lesson here is quite clear: the evolutionary development of a nervous system is an exclusive property of actively moving creatures.

Llinás says movement is the reason the brain developed.

In Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged from Chaos, Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam write:

A mind is a physical system that converts sensations into action. A mind takes in a set of inputs from its environment and transforms them into a set of environment-impacting outputs that, crucially, influence the welfare of its body. This process of changing inputs into outputs—of changing sensation into useful behavior—is thinking, the defining activity of a mind.

So Ogas and Gaddam go further, and say this activity, even at this rudimentary level, even before there is a brain, is thinking.

The first mind they discuss is that of the archaea. A mind requires a minimum of two thinking elements: a sensor and a doer. The simplest hypothetical mind would have one sensor and one doer. Apparently, we are not aware of such a thing on the planet. The simplest mind we are aware of is the archaea. The archaea has what they call a molecule mind:
“All the thinking elements in molecule minds consist of individually identifiable molecules.”

Archaea has two sensors and two doers. I’m not going to pretend I know much about this, and detail isn’t important for my point. The general idea is that a protein called rhodopsin changes shape when the light changes. This starts a chain of events that leads to the archaea’s archaella (flagella) moving, which moves the archaea. A little more detail is found starting at 3:00 of this video.

The archaella do not move because of the impact of the photons. Nor do they move because of a brute-force chain reaction, like dominos simply banging into each other. The archaella move because a series of chemical reactions carries the information that light with certain characteristics is in a certain direction. And that information directs the archaea, making it more likely to survive.

Is this thinking? I don’t think so. What an archaea does seems too mechanical to be called thinking. The series of chemical reactions is different than a brute-force chain reaction. It’s more complex. But it’s no less physical. Each chemical reaction in the series is still a physical stimulus and response, cause and effect event. I think it’s somewhere at the beginning of the evolution of thinking.

I think thinking is the brains physical activity that doesn’t, or at least doesn’t have to, cause the body to move. I can think about moving my arm without moving my arm. I can imagine moving my arm without ever intending to move it.

1+1 = 2 is a thought that doesn’t have anything to do with turning sensory input into action.

Bach and Beethoven are my favorite composers. They are extremely different. I could think at great length about them. Comparing and contrasting their music; examining the structure of their pieces; looking at chord progressions; comparing how they wrote fugues; who they worked for and the historical events of their times; on and on. I can do that or remaining perfectly still, with my eyes closed.

Imagining being a MLB pitcher, doing math in my head, and comparing Bach and Beethoven have nothing to do with moving my body, and aren’t intended to. I think that’s thinking.

[Gnomon]

@prothero

There is of course the integrated information theory of consciousness of Tononi and others.

Yes, my Enformationism thesis is based, in part, on our expanded understanding of Information, since Shannon’s practical engineering definition a century ago. Today, the Information-Energy Equivalence theory1 implies that Mental phenomena are among the many processed forms of Generic Energy, which I label as EnFormAction.

Presumably, what converts dispersed environmental Energy (e.g. sunlight) into focused Mental Information is its integration (combining & coordination of parts into a whole) by an Information Processor : a brain. We can generalize, from that holistic notion, a path from abiotic matter to living matter, and thence to thinking matter. And that is what my Enformationism thesis postulates.

@prothero

Whitehead writes a lot about “feeling” as a primitive form of experience or awareness see:

In Whitehead’s Process Philosophy, he uses some unconventional terminology to express the workings of the Process. For example, “prehension”, is an appreviation of the verb to apprehend : to reach out and grasp, to understand. And he seems to use it as a synonym of “subjective experience” or “the feeling of being”.

Similar to Panpsychism, Process Philosophy assumes that the Potential for Consciousness & Experience is universal. Yet it takes many different forms in evolution, only recently as Sentience. Unfortunately, Whitehead was rather opaque in his description of the fundamental units of existence (“actual entities”). So I have concluded that Causal Energy, Directed Causation2, is the universal Potential from which all phenomena, including Life and Mind emerge (are actualized)3.

@prothero

Ultimately of course it is all energy but elucidating that conception requires much more work.

Yes. But as quantum physicist (“it from bit”) John Wheeler exclaimed, “it’s all information!”. And as Einstein implied : everything in the universe is a form of energy4. But explaining how Energy & Information & Consciousness are interrelated requires a lot of work. So, it’s a work in Progress.

.

1. Here we formulate a new principle of mass-energy-information equivalence proposing that a bit of information is not just physical, as already demonstrated, but it has a finite and quantifiable mass while it stores information.
https://pubs.aip.org/aip/adv/article/9/9/095206/1076232/The-mass-energy-information-equivalence-principle

2. Directed Causation :
That organizing force in Nature is not some supernatural agency, but merely the combination of causal energy and directional information that went Bang about 14B years ago. It is the creativity inherent in nature.
https://bothandblog9.enformationism.info/page48.html

3. While classical panpsychism and Process Philosophy overlap significantly — and Alfred North Whitehead’s system is often classified as a sophisticated variant of panpsychism — they differ in key ways regarding how they define the basic units of existence.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=process+philosophy+compared+to+panpsychism

4. Yes, everything in the universe either possesses energy or is directly equivalent to it, though physicists describe energy as a fundamental property or characteristic of physical systems rather than a tangible “substance” itself.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=is+everything+in.+the+universe+a+form+of+energy

[Wayfarer]

@prothero

This seems as radical an emergence as that of (mind, experience, mentality, awareness, sentience, consciousness :pick your preferred term) from insentient inert matter or purely physical entities.

I understand panpsychism as an attempt to heal the mind–matter split by attributing mentality to matter. I agree with their diagnosis of the divide — but not with their proposed solution, which is the proposal that consciousness is somehow an intrinsic attribute of matter.

Biopsychism isn’t necessarily intended as an account of abiogenesis, or as an attempt to explain how consciousness arises from non-conscious matter (admittedly a question posed by the OP.) I was simply pointing to a conceptual alternative to panpsychism, which is the idea that consciousness first manifests or appears in the form of rudimentary organisms. Biopsychism has some things in common with panpsychism, in that it posits that consciousness is not limited to sentient beings (such as ourselves and the higher animals). But it sees no merit in proposing that it is an attribute of the inorganic domain generally, which can be described satisfactorily in terms of physics and chemistry.

@prothero

Discussing rocks, puddles, mud, sand, etc. as examples of “entities” attributed “consciousness” by panpsychism rather misses the point.

It’s a point I didn’t make. I said that inorganic matter does not act to preserve itself, but is subject to whatever forces happen to act upon it. I’m saying that, in this sense, life begins with entities that actively maintain themselves as distinct from their surrounding environment. That, I suggested, is the distant ancestor of ipseity (the sense of self or first-person awareness). This is where phenomenology of biology (for example Hans Jonas) draws an ontological line: he says that organisms are ‘ontologically surprising’.

Organisms exhibit properties and attributes which, whilst not contravening physical principles, can also not be fully explained with reference to them.

In the 1950s and 1960s… molecular biology uncovered two fundamental components of life—biological information and the genetic code—that are totally absent in the inorganic world, which means that information is present only in living systems, that chemistry alone is not enough and that a deep divide does exist between life and matter. This is the information paradigm, the idea that ‘life is chemistry plus information’ ~ Marcello Barbieri, What is Information?

How or when this ability or capacity arose is precisely the question posed by abiogenesis (‘life from non-life’) —̦ and it is still, and may always remain, an open question.

[Wayfarer]

@j_j

As I currently understand your view, you are an indirect realist, more or less. Consciousness emerges at some point and imposes form on something otherwise mostly formless, but with enough form ( I presume ) to explain the emergence of consciousness.

Not at all. Consider the question of the origin of life from a Kantian perspective. I suggest that it might be considered an antinomy - one of the questions which reason must pose but which may not be answereable. To render it along Kantian lines would be like this:

Thesis: Consciousness must have an origin in the physical world.

• The universe existed before human consciousness.
• Conscious organisms appeared only at some point in geological history.
• Therefore consciousness must have emerged from antecedent physical conditions.
• Hence consciousness is ultimately explicable in terms of the physical processes from which it arose.

⠀Antithesis: Consciousness cannot have an origin in the physical world.

• Every claim about the physical world is something given in consciousness and organised through the structures of cognition.
• The physical description of the brain is itself an object of conscious investigation.
• Therefore the physical world cannot be invoked as an independently characterised reality standing outside the conditions of consciousness in order to explain the emergence of consciousness.
• The explanation presupposes the very thing it purports to explain.

The point being both thesis and antithesis can be supported.

Schopenhauer, with whom you claim an affinity, makes this point explicitly. He describes the apparent contradiction as an “antinomy in our faculty of knowledge”: on the one hand, the conscious being is necessarily dependent upon the long chain of physical causes that preceded it; on the other, the entire temporal sequence in which those causes occur is itself only conceivable within consciousness. Hence his striking formulation: “time has no beginning, but all beginning is in time.”

Schopenhauer World as Will and Idea

Materialism… even at its birth, has death in its heart, because it ignores the subject and the forms of knowledge, which are presupposed, just as much in the case of the crudest matter, from which it desires to start, as in that of the organism, at which it desires to arrive. For, “no object without a subject,” is the principle which renders all materialism for ever impossible. Suns and planets without an eye that sees them, and an understanding that knows them, may indeed be spoken of in words, but for the idea, these words are absolutely meaningless.

On the other hand, the law of causality and the treatment and investigation of nature which is based upon it, lead us necessarily to the conclusion that, in time, each more highly organised state of matter has succeeded a cruder state: so that the lower animals existed before men, fishes before land animals, plants before fishes, and the unorganised before all that is organised; that, consequently, the original mass had to pass through a long series of changes before the first eye could be opened.

And yet, the existence of this whole world remains ever dependent upon the first eye that opened, even if it were that of an insect. For such an eye is a necessary condition of the possibility of knowledge, and the whole world exists only in and for knowledge, and without it is not even thinkable. The world is entirely idea, and as such demands the knowing subject as the supporter of its existence. This long course of time itself, filled with innumerable changes, through which matter rose from form to form till at last the first percipient creature appeared,—this whole time itself is only thinkable in the identity of a consciousness whose succession of ideas, whose form of knowing it is, and apart from which, it loses all meaning and is nothing at all.

Thus we see, on the one hand, the existence of the whole world necessarily dependent upon the first conscious being, however undeveloped it may be; on the other hand, this conscious being just as necessarily entirely dependent upon a long chain of causes and effects which have preceded it, and in which it itself appears as a small link. These two contradictory points of view, to each of which we are led with the same necessity, we might again call an antinomy in our faculty of knowledge…

The necessary contradiction which at last presents itself to us here, finds its solution in the fact that, to use Kant’s phraseology, time, space, and causality do not belong to the thing-in-itself, but only to its phenomena, of which they are the form; which in my language means this: The objective world, the world as idea, is not the only side of the world, but merely its outward side; and it has an entirely different side—the side of its inmost nature—its kernel—the thing-in-itself… But the world as idea… only appears with the opening of the first eye. Without this medium of knowledge it cannot be, and therefore it was not before it. But without that eye, that is to say, outside of knowledge, there was also no before, no time. Thus time has no beginning, but all beginning is in time (source).

So, I’m not an “indirect realist”, nor do I propose that “mind arises from matter” or that “matter has a mental element”. Those are three quite different understandings from the one I am trying to articulate.

[Elephant]

@invicta

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.

Yeah. Let’s start with the AI.

[j_j]

@Wayfarer

on the one hand, the conscious being is necessarily dependent upon the long chain of physical causes that preceded it; on the other, the entire temporal sequence in which those causes occur is itself only conceivable within consciousness.

Schopenhauer’s Kantian dualism is my least favorite component of his philosophy. It is insufficiently radical.

I appreciate the further sketch of your position. Conscious being is made dependent on “physical causes,” and this still suggests a dualism.

I think many an indirect realist will grant that the the emergence of consciousness allowed the universe previously operating in “darkness” to become visible. Hence the “hard problem.”

What is your current take on the hard problem ? This will help me further understand you.

[Patterner]

@prothero

Our everyday language centers around the notion of independent objects with inherent properties. " The ball is red" subject - adjective. The process view is that this is completely wrong even though it represents our everyday construction and notion of external reality.

I would like to know why it represents our everyday construction and notion of external reality. If the notion of independent objects with inherent properties is completely wrong, why did the universe work itself out to have entities that take themselves to be of that nature viewing everything else as being of that nature?

[Wayfarer]

@j_j

Conscious being is made dependent on “physical causes,”

What I said was ‘Organisms exhibit properties and attributes which, whilst not contravening physical principles, can also not be fully explained with reference to them.’

@j_j

Schopenhauer’s Kantian dualism is my least favorite component of his philosophy.

In what sense is it dualistic?

@j_j

What is your current take on the hard problem ? T

That it’s basically a rhetorical argument which is intended to show up the inherent limitations of physicalism.

[j_j]

@Wayfarer

In what sense is it dualistic?

In the title: the world as will and re-presentation.

But let me read charitably:

No truth therefore is more certain, more independent of all others, and less in need of proof than this, that all that exists for knowledge, and therefore this whole world, is only object in relation to subject, perception of a perceiver, in a word, idea. This is obviously true of the past and the future, as well as of the present, of what is farthest off, as of what is near; for it is true of time and space themselves, in which alone these distinctions arise. All that in any way belongs or can belong to the world is inevitably thus conditioned through the subject, and exists only for the subject. The world is idea.

I argue myself that “from-a-point-of-view-ness” is a fundamental feature of reality. So I am far from directly opposed to this bold passage.

How should we read “idea” ? If he means that world is world-for, then I agree. But I think he means “idea” as representation.

This truth is by no means new. It was implicitly involved in the sceptical reflections from which Descartes started. Berkeley, however, was the first who distinctly enunciated it, and by this he has rendered a permanent service to philosophy, even though the rest of his teaching should not endure. Kant’s primary mistake was the neglect of this principle, as is shown in the appendix. How early again this truth was recognised by the wise men of India, appearing indeed as the fundamental tenet of the Vedânta philosophy ascribed to Vyasa, is pointed out by Sir William Jones in the last of his essays: “On the philosophy of the Asiatics” (Asiatic Researches, vol. iv. p. 164), where he says, “The fundamental tenet of the Vedanta school consisted not in denying the existence of matter, that is, of solidity, impenetrability, and extended figure (to deny which would be lunacy), but in correcting the popular notion of it, and in contending that it has no essence independent of mental perception; that existence and perceptibility are convertible terms.” These words adequately express the compatibility of empirical reality and transcendental ideality.

This passage suggests phenomenalism. It is very close to Mill, who improved Berkeley by paying attention to the role of time.

That which knows all things and is known by none is the subject. Thus it is the supporter of the world, that condition of all phenomena, of all objects which is always pre-supposed throughout experience; for all that exists, exists only for the subject. Every one finds himself to be subject, yet only in so far as he knows, not in so far as he is an object of knowledge. But his body is object, and therefore from this point of view we call it idea. For the body is an object among objects, and is conditioned by the laws of objects, although it is an immediate object. Like all objects of perception, it lies within the universal forms of knowledge, time and space, which are the conditions of multiplicity. The subject, on the contrary, which is always the knower, never the known, does not come under these forms, but is presupposed by them; it has therefore neither multiplicity nor its opposite unity. We never know it, but it is always the knower wherever there is knowledge.

I think this is pretty great, but he should not call it a “condition.” I think it’s better to use “consciousness” instead of “subject” here and to avoid reification. The body is “an object among objects, conditioned by the laws of objects.” Consciousness is not something that “causes” presence. It “is” “presence” or “being,” but the noun “presence” tries to point not at anything within the causal nexus but at its “being there.”

Still, this is pretty sophisticated. But the dualism is: idea as a “surface” on “will.” There is a softer reading of this that links Schopenhauer to pragmatism and Freud, etc. One can view “word knowledge” as relatively shallow.

[Wayfarer]

@j_j

In the title: the world as will and re-presentation.

Schopenhauer opens his book with the famous declaration: “The world is my representation” (Die Welt ist meine Vorstellung) although in older English transations the book title is often given as ‘will and idea’. He is explicitly stating that everything we see, hear, and touch is a mental construct (vorstellung) generated by our brain’s cognitive hardware (including space, time, and causality). In asserting that our knowledge of the world is actively constituted by intuition and understanding, he shares a starting premise with Locke and the empiricists. But where he radically departs is his insistence that time, space, and matter do not exist in themselves; they are entirely the product of the way our cognitive faculties organize sensory input into a coherent experience (compare the discussion in the other thread on Nāgārjuna and the absence of inherent existence). But that doesn’t mean they’re only subjective; they form a universal framework, identical for any conscious mind experiencing the world. (Hence their designation as ‘transcendental’!)

Mill agreed that sensation is the real datum of experience, but he felt that we have every practical, empirical reason to accept that reality exists entirely independently of them. He was much more realist than was Kant and Schopenhauer. As an empiricist, he believed the mind is a blank slate, tabula rasa, and that even logic, mathematics, and causality are learned through repeated observation and induction from the real world. So the Idea is, for Mill, basically psychological. Kant and Schopenhauer (and Frege and Husserl for that matter) would not accept that proposition.

@j_j

I argue myself that “from-a-point-of-view-ness” is a fundamental feature of reality.

Well, very good: but that implies the subject whose perspective provides that point of view, right? And the Schopenhauer quote you give makes it explicit:

The subject…which is always the knower, never the known, does not come under these forms, but is presupposed by them; it has therefore neither multiplicity nor its opposite unity. We never know it, but it is always the knower wherever there is knowledge.

This is the respect in which Schopenhauer would say that his philosophy concords with the teachings of the Upanisads (one of which he read throughout his mature years. Michel Bitbol has a lecture called It Is Not Known But it is the Knower, in which he also cites the Upanisads.) This is the sense in which consciousness pervades everything—not as some mysterious pervading substantia, but because it is the ground of knowing. Which is pretty much as you say it is, and something you will also find in Wolfgang Fasching. But not in John Stuart Mill!
⠀

[j_j]

@Wayfarer

But where he radically departs is his insistence that time, space, and matter do not exist in themselves; they are entirely the product of the way our cognitive faculties organize sensory input into a coherent experience (compare the discussion in the other thread on Nāgārjuna and the absence of inherent existence).

To me this is one of the less plausible claims of Kant.

To call time and space “products” of something else is questionable. How does A produce space and time ? It must be “outside” (!?) of space and “before” (!?) time.

The word produce is at least usually intensely temporal and spatial. Like someone making breakfast in the kitchen this morning.

“Space and time” are “the form of experience” and yet I need to “see around space and time” to grok this claim.

The absence of inherent existence is more easily read as an expression of holism. “Finite” entities are abstractions, mere idealizations, for all things are entangled in all things. Only the whole is a genuine unity. And the unity of the whole is itself a rich topic. For the whole is a process making sense of itself.

[j_j]

@Wayfarer

Schopenhauer opens his book with the famous declaration: “The world is my representation” (Die Welt ist meine Vorstellung) although in older English transations the book title is often given as ‘will and idea’. He is explicitly stating that everything we see, hear, and touch is a mental construct (vorstellung) generated by our brain’s cognitive hardware (including space, time, and causality).

Right. So I am surprised that you asked me to point out the dualism.
Of course this is indirect realism !

Since brains are objects of perception, brains too are the product of brains. Which is absurd. Indeed, it’s this absurdity that helped inspire empiriocriticism and phenomenalism.

As far as I can tell, your view is what I suggest it was, a dualism of the Kantian variety. But I am not saying that this is Kant’s view but only a one common interpretation. And Kant is subject to this critique, because “perception == representation” is IMV the basic mistake here, and Kant is definite about that.

You seem to say that space and time are the products of the brain. But we are only tempted to cast the brain in this role because of our empirical experience. We understand the sign “production” in terms of this spatial-temporal experience.

@Wayfarer

This is the sense in which consciousness pervades everything—not as some mysterious pervading substantia, but because it is the ground of knowing.

For me that doesn’t work. Not the “ground” of knowing, for that’s just an object playing an explanatory role. But “being itself.”

This is not an issue of practical import, of course.

But you seem to say that “something” is translated by the brain into a spatial-temporal experience stuff. So consciousness is not being itself but some piece in what for me is a paradoxical cosmic narrative.

[Wayfarer]

@j_j

I argue myself that “from-a-point-of-view-ness” is a fundamental feature of reality

But not of time?

[j_j]

@Wayfarer

But not of time?

Being “is” time “is” consciousness.

This aphorism can only do so much. But Heidegger writes that "being-there (existence) is not in time but time itself." This echoes Heraclitus. The “transcendence” of an object requires temporality. The object is only here now as an object by not being “all the way” here. Plato’s unwritten doctrine, Saussure’s sound-image. Same deal. But obscured utterly by post-Cartesian dualism.

Humans and other intelligent animals scheme. The chair is not primarily a flashing perception. It is something that I viscerally count on as I scheme. So the “real” or the “true” is what we “in fact” ( in sub-verbal act) count on or take for granted.

The chair is an enduring interpersonal possibility. Not only of perception but more importantly of pragmatic function. I don’t primarily look at a parachute, for instance. I depend on it to make jumping out of a plane safe. I constantly enact risky expectation, and this expectation ( my movement now ) is shaped by a past that is therefore still present. But traditional philosopher wants to escape just this risky situation, to insist that it is unreal, appearance, illusion. “Time is unreal” is the traditional thesis of philosophy. It’s the first cousin at least of “perception lies.”

The umvelt of a sign-trading primate is structured by care. Remembering expectant movement in the world. In our case, we navigate richly historically sedimented signs. The words of long dead Aristotle still ring out. If we study seriously, the same signs open new depths for us, come to signify differently. But for this or that student, this or that perceiver.

And to be clear, yes I see “public clock time” as derivative. But Mach inspired Einstein to show the non-operational nullity of Newton’s presupposed God’s Time ( absolute time.) So Heidegger and other “relativists” are a bit like Einstein in relation to Newton.

[Wayfarer]

@j_j

The chair is not primarily a flashing perception.

I think you’re saying that the ‘problem of idealism’ is that, if objects only exist for subjects, then if the subject vanishes, so too the object! Kant is explicit about it:

We have therefore wanted to say that all our intuition is nothing but the representation of appearance; that the things that we intuit are not in themselves what we intuit them to be, nor are their relations so constituted in themselves as they appear to us; and that if we remove our own subject or even only the subjective constitution of the senses in general, then all the constitution, all relations of objects in space and time, indeed space and time themselves would disappear, and as appearances they cannot exist in themselves, but only in us. (A42, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, Cambridge University Press, 1998).

This is the aspect of Kant that most rankles contemporary scholars. But the way I put it is to say it is empirically true that the Universe exists independently of any particular mind. But what we know of its existence is inextricably bound by and to the mind we have, and so, in that sense, reality is not straightforwardly objective. It is not solely constituted by objects and their relations. Reality as disclosed to a knower has an ineliminably subjective or perspectival dimension, which itself is never revealed in empirical analysis. Whatever experience we have or knowledge we possess, it always occurs to a subject — a subject which only ever appears as us, as subject, not to us, as object.

The problem with naturalism is that, in its pursuit of ever more refined objectivity, it tends to forget the irreducible subjectivity of knowing itself. It progressively abstracts from the knower in order to describe the known, and then risks mistaking that abstraction for a complete account of reality (c.f. The Blind Spot, Gleiser, Thompson and Frank.)

[invicta]

Are you asking if current AI is conscious? I would answer in the negative, it may be close or has even passed the Turing test (I’m highly sceptical of this btw) but it’s no more than a highly advanced calculator albeit differing in methodology.

Consciousness is not just the ability to act, such as pure volition but awareness too. You can be aware/conscious without needing volition although this is not as useful as the ability to act/react because the latter can ensure self-preservation.

Consciousness is quite difficult to define because we’re trying at prescribe to inanimate matter the same qualities that gives us humans and animals consciousness. And this is where we get stuck because at some fundamental level matter is just energy concentrated, but I wouldn’t say that thought itself or consciousness is the same as energy. A thought itself may be produced by energy conversion in the brain but I hold that thought is not necessarily energy …

So then what is thought ? I think it’s a process in flow where thought output happens to be accidental rather than volitional for can we really choose our thoughts ? Try thinking of a unique thing in your mind, or generate a random thought … this will not prove much useful apart from diverging the conversation from consciousness to the issue of free will which are related to an extent.

As we perceive the world through our evolved vision passively we can see that the world exists externally but that’s only one part of consciousness. The wall that I’m staring at has not evolved vision… but that does not mean it’s not conscious at some fundamental level, essentially the atomic or subatomic world that builds up the wall could react to change passively. Yet by defining consciousness to passivity rather than activity we are again limiting the definition of consciousness for it is unknown to as when the atoms or constituents of a brick wall can passively/actively react.

Essentially what I am saying is that a wall can actually be alive despite our definition ruling out its aliveness.