Subject: Panpsychism & Causality
Date: Fri, 21 Nov 2008 16:58:44 -0800 (PST)
From: turtoni <turtoni@fastmail.net>
Organization: http://groups.google.com
Newsgroups: alt.philosophy

Guess we should take a stab at this philosophy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism

"Panpsychism, in philosophy, is either the view that all parts of
matter involve mind, or the more holistic view that the whole universe
is an organism that possesses a mind (see Pantheism and Panentheism).
It is thus a stronger and more ambitious view than hylozoism, which
holds only that all things are alive. This is not to say that
panpsychism believes that all matter is alive or even conscious but
rather that the constituent parts of matter are composed of some form
of mind and are sentient.

Panpsychism claims that everything is sentient and that there are
either many separate minds, or one single mind that unites everything
that is. The concept of the unconscious, made popular by the
psychoanalysts(!!), made possible a variant of panpsychism that denies
consciousness from some entities while still asserting the ubiquity of
mind.

Panexperientialism, as espoused by Alfred North Whitehead is a less
bold variation, which credits all entities with phenomenal
consciousness but not with cognition, and therefore not necessarily
with fully-fledged minds.

Panprotoexperientialism is a more cautious variation still, which
credits all entities with non-physical properties that are precursors
to phenomenal consciousness (or phenomenal consciousness in a latent,
undeveloped form) but not with cognition itself, or with conscious
awareness."

Here's some criticism:

"A criticism is that it can be demonstrated that the only properties
shared by all qualia are that they are not precisely describable, and
thus are of indeterminate meaning within any philosophy which relies
upon precise definition. This has been something of a blow to
panpsychism in general, since some of the same problems seem to be
present in panpsychism in that it tends to presuppose a definition for
mentality without describing it in any real detail. (What separates
mental and non-mental phenomena?)

The panpsychist answers both these challenges in the same way: we
already know what qualia are through direct, introspective
apprehension; and we likewise know what conscious mentality is by
virtue of being conscious. For someone like Alfred North Whitehead,
third-person description takes second place to the intimate connection
between every entity and every other which is, he says, the very
fabric of reality. To take a mere description as having primary
reality is to commit the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness".

Another criticism is that we have a detailed understanding of how
cognition — thought, memory, etc — work in terms of the functioning
and structure of the brain. If the matter that the brain is made of
already has cognitive abilities simply by virtue of being matter, then
cognition is somehow being done twice over.

One response is to separate the phenomenal, non-cognitive aspects of
consciousness — particularly qualia, the essence of the hard problem
of consciousness — from cognition. Thus panpsychism is transformed
into panexperientialism. However, this strategy of division generates
problems of its own: what is going on causally in the head of someone
who is thinking -- cognitively of course -- about their qualia?"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causality

"Causality denotes a necessary relationship between one event (called
cause) and another event (called effect) which is the direct
consequence (result) of the first.

While this informal understanding will suffice in everyday use, the
philosophical analysis of causality has proven difficult. The work of
philosophers to understand causality and how best to characterize it
extends over millennia. In the western philosophical tradition
explicit discussion stretches back at least as far as Aristotle, and
the topic remains a staple in contemporary philosophy journals. Though
cause and effect are typically related to events, other candidates
include processes, properties, variables, facts, and states of
affairs; which of these comprise the correct causal relata, and how
best to characterize the nature of the relationship between them, has
as yet no universally accepted answer, and remains under discussion."

dot dot dot.