permaculture

[Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>]

[a very interesting article]

"Panpsychists hold that consciousness emerges from the combination of
billions of subatomic consciousnesses, just as the brain emerges from the
organisation of billions of subatomic particles. "

Why panpsychism fails to solve the mystery of consciousness | Aeon Ideas
https://aeon.co/ideas/why-panpsychism-fails-to-solve-
the-mystery-of-consciousness

"Is consciousness everywhere? Is it a basic feature of the Universe, at the
very heart of the tiniest subatomic particles? Such an idea – *panpsychism*
as it is known – might sound like New Age mysticism, but some hard-nosed
analytic philosophers have suggested it might be how things are, and it’s
now a hot topic in philosophy of mind.

Panpsychism’s popularity stems from the fact that it promises to solve two
deep problems simultaneously. The first is the famous ‘hard problem’ of
consciousness. How does the brain produce conscious experience? How can
neurons firing give rise to experiences of colour, sound, taste, pain and
so on? In principle, scientists could map my brain processes in complete
detail but, it seems, they could never detect my experiences themselves –
the way colours look, pain feels and so on: the *phenomenal properties* of
the brain states involved. Somehow, it seems, brain processes acquire a
subjective aspect, which is invisible to science. How can we possibly
explain this?

The second problem concerns an apparent gap in our scientific picture of
the world. Physics aims to describe the fundamental constituents of the
Universe – the basic subatomic particles from which everything is made,
together with the laws that govern them. Yet physics seems to leave out
something very important from its picture of the basic particles. It tells
us, for example, that an electron has a certain mass, charge and spin. But
this is a description of how an electron is disposed to *behave*: to have
mass is to resist acceleration, to have charge is to respond in a certain
way to electromagnetic fields, and so on. Physics doesn’t say what an
electron, or any other basic particle, is like in itself, *intrinsically*.
And, arguably, it never could, since its conceptual resources –
mathematical concepts, together with the concepts of causation and
spatiotemporal position – are suitable only for describing structures and
processes, not intrinsic qualities. Yet it is plausible to think that
particles can’t just be collections of dispositions; they must have some
intrinsic *categorical* properties that give rise to their dispositions."

"Here, some philosophers argue, there is scope for an exciting synthesis.
Maybe consciousness – the elusive subjective aspect of our brain states –
is the ingredient missing from physics. Perhaps phenomenal properties, or
‘proto-phenomenal’ precursors of them, are the fundamental intrinsic
properties of matter we’re looking for, and each subatomic particle is a
tiny conscious subject. This solves the hard problem: brain and
consciousness emerge together when billions of basic particles are
assembled in the right way. The brain arises from the particles’
dispositions to interact and combine, and consciousness arises from what
the particles are like in themselves. They are two sides of the same coin –
or, rather, since on this view consciousness is the fundamental reality
underlying physical reality, brains are manifestations of consciousness. As
it holds that there is a single reality underlying both mind and matter,
panpsychism is a form of *monism*. The label ‘Russellian monism’ is
sometimes used for it and closely related positions, because Bertrand
Russell proposed similar ideas in *The Analysis of Matter *(1927)."