Panpsychism

[chaz wyman]

That is interesting. Sounds like an objective version of existentialism, but I do not see any help for Panpsychism, eh?

According to Whitehead, each actual occasion (smallest unit of reality; sort of like a quantum event) has awareness. In a primordial way it experiences its past and its present surroundings. Whitehead calls it an “occasion of experience.” So experience, not just inert matter, goes all the way down, so to speak. Whitehead does not use the term "panpsychism," and others have called his theory "panexperientialism." But the idea that experience is as fundamental as matter is a form of panpsychism.

i think this could be called "data". As all things contain data and data are interpreted by all things as interpretation is just the process and result of "filtering" reality, whether or naught the reality is equal to its data or the data is just a representation of actual reality. Problem I think is that there are no reasons for why this data should be accessible to us "before" we have learned how to actually understand data, meaning to learn how to "filter" it in relation to us and therefore in relation to our world which consists of wildly other kinds of data than the data at small levels which may or may not be actual and therefore on a whole different level than our "representative" reality.

You have hit upon one of the most important questions in human experience here. Perception is all about interpretation. Each given set of presuppositions determines the means by which we can look and even see things. Everything is seen through the subject, we never see an object.
One man's data is another's white noise.

Data only exists in a fictional framework. There is always something factual about it, but as we need the fiction to see it we can never ultimately be sure where the fiction starts and the faction begins.



try to imagine the collision of atoms: how would your mind know how to "interpret" this? Of course it would interpret it, but it would make no sense to the mind because prior knowledge does not understand how it all relates.

[The Voice of Time]

You have hit upon one of the most important questions in human experience here. Perception is all about interpretation. Each given set of presuppositions determines the means by which we can look and even see things. Everything is seen through the subject, we never see an object.
One man's data is another's white noise.

Data only exists in a fictional framework. There is always something factual about it, but as we need the fiction to see it we can never ultimately be sure where the fiction starts and the faction begins.

indeed, though what I talking about: "what presuppositions do we have for a kind of data for which we have no processor for?". Your vocabulary helps though.

[lancek4]

That is interesting. Sounds like an objective version of existentialism, but I do not see any help for Panpsychism, eh?

According to Whitehead, each actual occasion (smallest unit of reality; sort of like a quantum event) has awareness. In a primordial way it experiences its past and its present surroundings. Whitehead calls it an “occasion of experience.” So experience, not just inert matter, goes all the way down, so to speak. Whitehead does not use the term "panpsychism," and others have called his theory "panexperientialism." But the idea that experience is as fundamental as matter is a form of panpsychism.

i think this could be called "data". As all things contain data and data are interpreted by all things as interpretation is just the process and result of "filtering" reality, whether or naught the reality is equal to its data or the data is just a representation of actual reality. Problem I think is that there are no reasons for why this data should be accessible to us "before" we have learned how to actually understand data, meaning to learn how to "filter" it in relation to us and therefore in relation to our world which consists of wildly other kinds of data than the data at small levels which may or may not be actual and therefore on a whole different level than our "representative" reality.

try to imagine the collision of atoms: how would your mind know how to "interpret" this? Of course it would interpret it, but it would make no sense to the mind because prior knowledge does not understand how it all relates.

Sythetical sorority ? -

I think the 'data' idea sounds alot like Hawkings 'information' idea.

I see much of this type of discussion amounting to a situating of knowledge. As if the terms of knowledge are granting us real things. I have difficulty making experiments on this type of uncontroled 'controls'. Which term is the control group? Which term is the base ground upon or around which we can come to a true conclusion of the result? It always seems to me that every term in the equation varies with each proposal.

Some wish to clarify what base grounds our thought experiment here?

[chaz wyman]

That is interesting. Sounds like an objective version of existentialism, but I do not see any help for Panpsychism, eh?

i think this could be called "data". As all things contain data and data are interpreted by all things as interpretation is just the process and result of "filtering" reality, whether or naught the reality is equal to its data or the data is just a representation of actual reality. Problem I think is that there are no reasons for why this data should be accessible to us "before" we have learned how to actually understand data, meaning to learn how to "filter" it in relation to us and therefore in relation to our world which consists of wildly other kinds of data than the data at small levels which may or may not be actual and therefore on a whole different level than our "representative" reality.

try to imagine the collision of atoms: how would your mind know how to "interpret" this? Of course it would interpret it, but it would make no sense to the mind because prior knowledge does not understand how it all relates.

Sythetical sorority ? -

I think the 'data' idea sounds alot like Hawkings 'information' idea.

I see much of this type of discussion amounting to a situating of knowledge. As if the terms of knowledge are granting us real things. I have difficulty making experiments on this type of uncontroled 'controls'. Which term is the control group? Which term is the base ground upon or around which we can come to a true conclusion of the result? It always seems to me that every term in the equation varies with each proposal.

Some wish to clarify what base grounds our thought experiment here?

This all sounds like a materialist position, none of which should be in a discussion about panpsychism - which is looney tunes anyway.
For me, though, all of this panpsychism, Hawking's information , Whitehead's data, and Panpsychism show increasing degrees of anthropomorphism.
But whilst I accept that we are bound to see the Universe through our own eyes it is a mistake to think that is the Universe in-itself.
There is no ultimate control group for metaphysical proposition which they all are.

[chaz wyman]

You have hit upon one of the most important questions in human experience here. Perception is all about interpretation. Each given set of presuppositions determines the means by which we can look and even see things. Everything is seen through the subject, we never see an object.
One man's data is another's white noise.

Data only exists in a fictional framework. There is always something factual about it, but as we need the fiction to see it we can never ultimately be sure where the fiction starts and the faction begins.

indeed, though what I talking about: "what presuppositions do we have for a kind of data for which we have no processor for?". Your vocabulary helps though.

THere are data for which we are as yet unaware and other data which we now see as white noise because we no longer believe the presupposition.
One might compare astrological data with astronomical data: or data about the creation against evolution.

[The Voice of Time]

THere are data for which we are as yet unaware and other data which we now see as white noise because we no longer believe the presupposition.
One might compare astrological data with astronomical data: or data about the creation against evolution.

you have to go deeper in that. Did not understand what you just said there...

[MGL]

Chaz: The POINT being that if a ROCK cannot experience then how much LESS can a 'fiction' experience, responding to Empedocles' objection.

MGL:

Empedocles' objection suggests the point that macroscopic objects can only be considered to be experiencing anything if the occasions of experience of which they are constructed from are combined\united in a suitable way - as they are in a brain.

The modern panpsychist hypothesis is meant to explain consciousness within the context of modern scientific knowledge. The fact that much of this knowledge is "fiction" cannot be an argument solely against pansychism as it is within this "fiction" that pansychism seeks consistency. If you want to object to panpsychism on these grounds then you must object to the fiction of scientific knowledge as a whole as well.


=============================

Chaz: Such fictions are beyond experience.

MGL: Surely, if everying is reducable to "fictitious" particles of matter and energy, including the process of perception, then such fictions have to be part of experience.

Chaz: Then clearly not everything can be reduced by these theories AND preserve wholly the phenomena of experience.

MGL:

So in other words phenomenal experience just magically pops into existence when neurons are firing in a brain. A wholly new property of reality emerges from something remotely different. This is like explaining the emergence of a rabbit from a hat as a consequence of someone saying "abracadabra".

[Arising_uk]

So in other words phenomenal experience just magically pops into existence when neurons are firing in a brain. ...

What do you mean by "phenomenal experience" in this instance?

[Wyatt Debble]

...I have written a summary of some of the arguments in favor, too long to post on this forum, here: http://www.bmeacham.com/blog/?p=568. I invite your reasoned discussion.

[Inserting an extraction from it, here: ] "As Strawson points out, seeming itself is a type of experience, so the argument fails on the face of it.(4) Dennett’s claim is not so absurd as it sounds, because Dennett is arguing that what is really real is the brain activity that creates our experience. He says, for instance, that our experience seems smooth and continuous, but the physiology behind it is discontinuous and full of gaps. Hence, our experience is not really continuous at all.(5) But that just begs the question. In order to know anything about brain activity we have to see readings on dials, squiggles on paper, etc., and seeing is a kind of experience. The one thing we cannot doubt, when we are experiencing something, is that experience is going on. We can find out that we are mistaken about the objects of our experience, as when we see a hallucination or an optical illusion, but that we are experiencing is the bedrock of everything."

Yes, if something akin to blindsight engulfed all the sense modes, there seems to be no alternative means of evidence available that conclusions about the environment are being drawn from received data. Reasoning would lack both private and public exhibition of itself transpiring even as language, since the latter is normally presented as phenomenal occurrences like everything else. There might be a non-experiential way that a transcendent universe verified its existence and transactions between its components (assuming that's what a materialism hostile to "pan-whatever" implies), but humans apparently have no access to it, apart from any representations as an abstract, yet phenomenally instantiated, placeholder or symbol for those who might consider it a useful or necessary idea.

[Empedocles]

I see much of this type of discussion amounting to a situating of knowledge. As if the terms of knowledge are granting us real things. I have difficulty making experiments on this type of uncontrolled 'controls'. Which term is the control group? Which term is the base ground upon or around which we can come to a true conclusion of the result? It always seems to me that every term in the equation varies with each proposal.

All we have is our experience of the world. We do not have the world "in itself" as Kant would say. So we have to make sense of our experience. Such "fictions" as sub-atomic particles are explanatory concepts that organize our understanding of our experience well enough that we can make predictions that turn out to come true. From such conceptual systems we create all the technology that we now enjoy and make use of. We call such systems "true" when they work well enough for this purpose. We don't compare our conceptual systems with the world in itself. We compare one part of our experience, our conceptual understanding, with another part, our actions in the world. The base ground you are seeking is our experience of the world as it responds to our actions in it.

Metaphysics goes beyond scientific theories in formulating conceptual systems that have enough internal coherence to encompass ideas about things that science does not address. The idea that microphysical entities such as sub-atomic "particles" have a sort of proto-experience cannot be verified by experiment. The assumption that they do and the assumption that they don't are equally congruent with the established physical facts. But the panpsychist view is more coherent another observed fact -- that we ourselves enjoy a rich conscious experience of the world -- than the purely materialist view.

It is true that there is physical stuff out there. And it is true that we each are conscious, that we each have our own private, internal experience of the world. To get a coherent and complete conceptual view of the world we have include both of those facts. The materialist view has a hard time explaining how consciousness arises from inert matter. This is the famous "hard problem" that Chalmers talks about. The panpsychist view has an easier time. If everything has some degree of awareness of its surroundings then it is not unreasonable to postulate that increasingly complex organizations of matter are accompanied by increasingly complex organizations of experience.

[Empedocles]

So in other words phenomenal experience just magically pops into existence when neurons are firing in a brain. ...

What do you mean by "phenomenal experience" in this instance?

I will let MGL say what he or she means by the term, but what I mean by it is just ordinary experience, what we have when we are awake. Phenomenal experience is always experience of something, such as people, trees, books, food – all the things around us – or of subjective things such as bodily sensations, thoughts, feelings, etc. That's the "phenomenal" part: phenomena are what are presented to us.

[chaz wyman]

Chaz: The POINT being that if a ROCK cannot experience then how much LESS can a 'fiction' experience, responding to Empedocles' objection.

MGL:

Empedocles' objection suggests the point that macroscopic objects can only be considered to be experiencing anything if the occasions of experience of which they are constructed from are combined\united in a suitable way - as they are in a brain.

The modern panpsychist hypothesis is meant to explain consciousness within the context of modern scientific knowledge. The fact that much of this knowledge is "fiction" cannot be an argument solely against pansychism as it is within this "fiction" that pansychism seeks consistency. If you want to object to panpsychism on these grounds then you must object to the fiction of scientific knowledge as a whole as well.

That is the most nicely put non-sequitur I have read this week; not the only non sequitur but the one most likely to bamboozle someone who is not thinking.
Panpsychism has nothing to offer science, any more that a rock does

=============================

Chaz: Such fictions are beyond experience.

MGL: Surely, if everying is reducable to "fictitious" particles of matter and energy, including the process of perception, then such fictions have to be part of experience.

No. The point is that they are only available to us qua fictions or models if you prefer. they help us understand the events around us- until the model breaks down.
Simply you are failing to understand the relationship between language and reality.
We can experience the WORD 'atom" but never an atom.
Do I really need to have to say this to you?



Chaz: Then clearly not everything can be reduced by these theories AND preserve wholly the phenomena of experience.

MGL:

So in other words phenomenal experience just magically pops into existence when neurons are firing in a brain.

No. Neurones firing in the brain is the model (the fiction) we apply to help materialise our conception of phenomenal experience.
The joy with this sort of model is that it can be demonstrated - unlike Panpsychism (whatever that is)

A wholly new property of reality emerges from something remotely different.

In your imagination?

This is like explaining the emergence of a rabbit from a hat as a consequence of someone saying "abracadabra".

If it makes you happy.

[chaz wyman]

I see much of this type of discussion amounting to a situating of knowledge. As if the terms of knowledge are granting us real things. I have difficulty making experiments on this type of uncontrolled 'controls'. Which term is the control group? Which term is the base ground upon or around which we can come to a true conclusion of the result? It always seems to me that every term in the equation varies with each proposal.

All we have is our experience of the world. We do not have the world "in itself" as Kant would say. So we have to make sense of our experience. Such "fictions" as sub-atomic particles are explanatory concepts that organize our understanding of our experience well enough that we can make predictions that turn out to come true. From such conceptual systems we create all the technology that we now enjoy and make use of. We call such systems "true" when they work well enough for this purpose. We don't compare our conceptual systems with the world in itself. We compare one part of our experience, our conceptual understanding, with another part, our actions in the world. The base ground you are seeking is our experience of the world as it responds to our actions in it.

Metaphysics goes beyond scientific theories in formulating conceptual systems that have enough internal coherence to encompass ideas about things that science does not address.


And it is thus we move from fiction to fantasy.
The idea that meta is indeed beyond, is a unverifiable claim, and rather contentious in our post religious world rejected by most modern philosophers.
In a very important sense there may be no place for any such claim beyond the imagination, and imagination may be no more than that which metaphysics is.
Worst still, this claim is that upon which your other claim about Panpsychism relies.
I think we have a circular argument here.


The idea that microphysical entities such as sub-atomic "particles" have a sort of proto-experience cannot be verified by experiment. The assumption that they do and the assumption that they don't are equally congruent with the established physical facts. But the panpsychist view is more coherent another observed fact -- that we ourselves enjoy a rich conscious experience of the world -- than the purely materialist view.
It is true that there is physical stuff out there. And it is true that we each are conscious, that we each have our own private, internal experience of the world. To get a coherent and complete conceptual view of the world we have include both of those facts. The materialist view has a hard time explaining how consciousness arises from inert matter. This is the famous "hard problem" that Chalmers talks about. The panpsychist view has an easier time. If everything has some degree of awareness of its surroundings then it is not unreasonable to postulate that increasingly complex organizations of matter are accompanied by increasingly complex organizations of experience.

[chaz wyman]

So in other words phenomenal experience just magically pops into existence when neurons are firing in a brain. ...

What do you mean by "phenomenal experience" in this instance?

I will let MGL say what he or she means by the term, but what I mean by it is just ordinary experience, what we have when we are awake. Phenomenal experience is always experience of something, such as people, trees, books, food – all the things around us – or of subjective things such as bodily sensations, thoughts, feelings, etc. That's the "phenomenal" part: phenomena are what are presented to us.

Phenomenal experience????

Is that not a tautology?

[lancek4]

I see much of this type of discussion amounting to a situating of knowledge. As if the terms of knowledge are granting us real things. I have difficulty making experiments on this type of uncontrolled 'controls'. Which term is the control group? Which term is the base ground upon or around which we can come to a true conclusion of the result? It always seems to me that every term in the equation varies with each proposal.

All we have is our experience of the world. We do not have the world "in itself" as Kant would say. So we have to make sense of our experience. Such "fictions" as sub-atomic particles are explanatory concepts that organize our understanding of our experience well enough that we can make predictions that turn out to come true. From such conceptual systems we create all the technology that we now enjoy and make use of. We call such systems "true" when they work well enough for this purpose. We don't compare our conceptual systems with the world in itself. We compare one part of our experience, our conceptual understanding, with another part, our actions in the world. The base ground you are seeking is our experience of the world as it responds to our actions in it.

Metaphysics goes beyond scientific theories in formulating conceptual systems that have enough internal coherence to encompass ideas about things that science does not address. The idea that microphysical entities such as sub-atomic "particles" have a sort of proto-experience cannot be verified by experiment. The assumption that they do and the assumption that they don't are equally congruent with the established physical facts. But the panpsychist view is more coherent another observed fact -- that we ourselves enjoy a rich conscious experience of the world -- than the purely materialist view.

It is true that there is physical stuff out there. And it is true that we each are conscious, that we each have our own private, internal experience of the world. To get a coherent and complete conceptual view of the world we have include both of those facts. The materialist view has a hard time explaining how consciousness arises from inert matter. This is the famous "hard problem" that Chalmers talks about. The panpsychist view has an easier time. If everything has some degree of awareness of its surroundings then it is not unreasonable to postulate that increasingly complex organizations of matter are accompanied by increasingly complex organizations of experience.

So basically you are attempting to make sense of your experience. And you are putting it forth as a logical scheme based on your experience and your understanding of others experience. So what happens when your idea can be explained by a more comprehensive and simple explanation?
It looks to me that you just set that explanation aside for the sake of you explanation and ignore that someone else put your explanation as extraneous.