Panpsychism - A spiritual and philosophical challenge

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Alexander Bard

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Jul 12, 2017, 2:13:37 PM7/12/17
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Dear Friends

If you're up for a serious philosophical and spiritual discussion in the midst of your summer vacation, I would suggest the enormously sensitive but fascinating subject of "panpsychism".

Statements like "The Universe has a subjective consciousness" makes me cringe, for the very simple reason that is is meaningless to speak of conscious subjectivity without at least a decent human brain to experience it with, and even the dumbest human being has more of a human brain than the entire so far known non-human universe. The Universe seems more content without a consciousness (or can simply afford to not have one), leaving the conscious bits to us poor human beings.

But the idea that "mind" has more to it than "human mind" arises as soon as we realise that "quantum mechanics" is a misnomer that really should be referred to as "quantum organics" and the emergent division between say chemistry and biology is not as clear-cut as we had previously assumed. It also turns out that quite a lot of amazing thinkers throughout the ages supported panpsychism one way or the other. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism

May I also suggest for the health of the debate that we just not throw opinions at each other based on loose arguements (at best) and feelings (at worst) but also try to act Devil's Advocate against our own ideas on the issue? So let's minimise the prestige and maximise the playfulness, it is after all summer in the northern hemisphere. OK?

What is "consciousness"? What is "mind"? And would there be any form of "panpsychism" that we could find if not acceptable than at least tolerable?

Best intentions
Alexander

Nick Seneca Jankel

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Jul 12, 2017, 2:31:26 PM7/12/17
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Suggest Galen strawson 'does physicalism neccistate panpsychism'

A total materialist atheist who has realized that if we believe consciousness exists at all (and not an illusion a la Dan dennett) then it has to be everywhere in nature 

:)

Sent from my iPhone. Please excuse brev
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Josef Gustafsson

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Jul 12, 2017, 2:47:50 PM7/12/17
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Peter Sjöstedt-H and I recorded a podcast last fall in which we talked about panpsychism and some philosophical questions related to the subject. Perhaps it can be a good introduction for those less familiar with the topic.


Josef

Skickat från min iPhone

Daniel Görtz

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Jul 12, 2017, 3:14:31 PM7/12/17
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Thanks Alexander, I'll have to brief with my input but here are some initial reactions:

This is one of my favorite topics and I just mentioned it briefly in a series we're editing for Metamoderna in August. My favorite thinker on the subject at this time is Peter Sjöstedt, a Swedish guy working in the UK (a kind of neo-nihilist philosopher). He has a one hour presentation that I think discusses the issue in a very sober yet evocative manner, see youtube:

https://youtu.be/tFL_yPgrewA

His main and best argument is parsimony: it's easier to think of the universe as having consciousness as a fundamental category than to think of a mechanism through which an extended (res extensa) phenomenon (having spacial dimensions) "causing" a non-extended phenomenon (phenomenological experience itself).

My second favorite thinker on the subject, who may be somewhat less relevant to the topic as a whole, is Brian Tomasic, a kind of advanced utilitarian and effective altruist (don't judge, he's better than most of that crowd). What I love about this guy's article is how boldly and radically his mind traverses seemingly absurd topics, and how systematically he does it.

http://reducing-suffering.org/is-there-suffering-in-fundamental-physics/

There is also "Quantum Mind" by Alexander Wendt which argues along these lines, but it's not in itself a strong philosophical work, so he merely makes some relevant suggestions. Other interesting pathways to explore here are of course the ones opened by Integrated Information Theory 


A thinker I don't particularly like in this context is David Chalmers, as I feel he seeks to animate societies and systems with consciousness. I do think Ken Wilber discusses these topics well in Sex Ecology Spirituality.



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Alexander Bard

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Jul 12, 2017, 4:32:21 PM7/12/17
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The problem is that the argument that "consciousness has to be everywhere if consciousness is to exist at all" is that it is not that different from other claims that emergent phenomena have to be built into what they emerged from it they are said to exist all, in other words we resort to total absolute reductionism which although it was a fantasy of both Plato and Einstein clearly does not make sense along history's timeline. If consciousness emerged out of biology it clearly did not exist prior to biology. And then it at least does not exist in the parts of The Universe where biology has not yet reached. Which seems to be most of it. We can not throw around emergent phenomena in any new age fluffy sort of way. We need to clearly define "mind", "consciousness" et cetera before we even try to do so. This is not an area where we should allow any sloppiness whatsoever.
Best
Alexander

2017-07-12 20:47 GMT+02:00 Josef Gustafsson <josefgu...@me.com>:
Peter Sjöstedt-H and I recorded a podcast last fall in which we talked about panpsychism and some philosophical questions related to the subject. Perhaps it can be a good introduction for those less familiar with the topic.


Josef

Skickat från min iPhone

12 juli 2017 kl. 20:31 skrev Nick Seneca Jankel <ni...@switchonworldwide.com>:

Suggest Galen strawson 'does physicalism neccistate panpsychism'

A total materialist atheist who has realized that if we believe consciousness exists at all (and not an illusion a la Dan dennett) then it has to be everywhere in nature 

:)

Sent from my iPhone. Please excuse brev

On Jul 12, 2017, at 8:13 PM, Alexander Bard <bardi...@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear Friends

If you're up for a serious philosophical and spiritual discussion in the midst of your summer vacation, I would suggest the enormously sensitive but fascinating subject of "panpsychism".

Statements like "The Universe has a subjective consciousness" makes me cringe, for the very simple reason that is is meaningless to speak of conscious subjectivity without at least a decent human brain to experience it with, and even the dumbest human being has more of a human brain than the entire so far known non-human universe. The Universe seems more content without a consciousness (or can simply afford to not have one), leaving the conscious bits to us poor human beings.

But the idea that "mind" has more to it than "human mind" arises as soon as we realise that "quantum mechanics" is a misnomer that really should be referred to as "quantum organics" and the emergent division between say chemistry and biology is not as clear-cut as we had previously assumed. It also turns out that quite a lot of amazing thinkers throughout the ages supported panpsychism one way or the other. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism

May I also suggest for the health of the debate that we just not throw opinions at each other based on loose arguements (at best) and feelings (at worst) but also try to act Devil's Advocate against our own ideas on the issue? So let's minimise the prestige and maximise the playfulness, it is after all summer in the northern hemisphere. OK?

What is "consciousness"? What is "mind"? And would there be any form of "panpsychism" that we could find if not acceptable than at least tolerable?

Best intentions
Alexander

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Alex Curpas

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Jul 13, 2017, 3:14:05 AM7/13/17
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Hi all!

When it comes to physics and philosophy I really like Sean Carroll, I think he's probably the best physics explainer alive today for laymen like myself. His view as I understand it is as follows:

- while there are still frontiers to explore like dark matter, dark energy, very high energy physics, quantum gravity, etc., our current understanding of fundamental physics is good enough to explain everything that is of direct relevance to human life. (at a fundamental level)
- within this sphere there is only one reality which can be fully explained using quantum field theory. Physicists are certain that is theoretically impossible for instance, for a new fundamental force or a new type of fundamental particle with any relevance to consciousness to exist. 
- from this fundamental reality of quantum field theory, things like life and consciousness are emergent phenomena. The way I read this is that you can observe quantum effects if you look closely at how, for example, serotonin acts on the HTC1A receptor, but it's not very useful to discuss consciousness overall in terms of quantum field theory. 
- when people talk about quantum consciousness they generally mix concepts in ways that they should not be mixed, resulting in much confusion. 
- from all of this my conclusion is that consciousness can only exist several levels above the fundamental world of quantum physics, and that it requires complex things like cells with membranes capable of producing an electric potential and some sort of inter-cellular signaling mechanism at the very least. 

Here's the one-hour version of this in the form of a Google Talk, but there are longer versions of this too which I thought were worth the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x26a-ztpQs8

Alex


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Alexander Bard

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Jul 13, 2017, 4:35:30 AM7/13/17
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Dearest Alex

I totally agree with Sean Carroll and how not found any reasonable arguments against his position.
Or to rephrase that: If consciousness is an inherent quality to everything in existence - and not just an emergent quality originating in biology - then why do these enthusiastic panpyschists not raise the dead back to life since apparently human corpses are as conscious as everything else.
First life, then consciousness. No life, no consciousness. Meaning I have yet to find any meaningful reason for panpsychism.

Brotherly love
Alexander

Alex Curpas

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Jul 13, 2017, 7:54:18 AM7/13/17
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Dearest Alexander and fellow syntheists,

The counter argument here is that a corpse still has consciousness in the form of bacteria that break it down, or that even atoms have a tiny bit of consciousness, just not enough for stuff like language or philosophy. I think it's a pretty weak argument.

When it comes to how life might emerge from inorganic matter and evolve consciousness, I think another very interesting piece of the puzzle is provided by Dr. Andreas Wagner in his book Arrival of the Fittest. He sums up his arguments in this RI talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aD4HUGVN6Ko

Unfortunately the talk leaves out what I thought was the most interesting part in the book, which has to do with how very early life might have arisen - perhaps because that is not his most interesting and original contribution to the field. I think that the book makes a strong argument against some of Peter Sjöstedt-H's arguments for panpsychism. The other arguments I think are just around how we define consciousness.

I'll agree with Peter S-H that it's hard to draw the line between conscious and unconscious organisms, but I don't think that this can lead to any substantial case for panpsychism. Basically Peter S-H uses this to say that maybe it's because everything has consciousness, but Daniel Dennett looks at the same picture and says "nothing has consciousness", both statements are equally silly, unprovable and unfalsifiable.

What about going up in complexity beyond the human brain though? Is there such a thing as a collective consciousness? I think that these ideas are perhaps more interesting to explore.

Semi-consciously yours,

Alex

\\ Joerg Jungwirth //

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Jul 13, 2017, 8:07:04 AM7/13/17
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Hi Gentlemen.

This is a very intruiging exchange for me. Since I have explored states of consciousness from an experiential level a lot in the past and didn't meet many people except my teachers yet with whom to share about the experiences or even go so far as to look at theorethical models to describe the experiences made.

So I'm happy to follow your trains of thought, get insights into your perspectives (Already happening - Thx, Alex, Daniel & Alexander!) and when it seems a contribution add my own state of the art

Best, Joe 

Brent Cooper

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Jul 13, 2017, 12:08:12 PM7/13/17
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Oh Dear Alexander,

This thread is split into multiple instantiations now, like a two-slit experiment. My cursory critique of the rejection of panpsychism is that it's a semantic problem, and depends entirely on how we define consciousness in this sense. Of course you are correct, consciousness is emergent and therefore cannot exist in the rock. But Wendt's way of unpacking it is to say 'psyche' means 'proto-subjectivity,' and that the requisites of consciousness (Cognition, Experience, Will) can find analogues (wave-function, collapse, probability/process) in quantum physics. Wendt says if rocks do have trace 'consciousness' at the subatomic level, there is no structures for quantum coherence (like a brain; retention in memory), and thus "losing its identity immediately to the vacuum." And as the argument goes, there is no substance at the quantum level anyway, only information, so perhaps this informationalist view is grounds for panpsychism as such. 

This is by no means a complete response, but food for thought. I also think the Tree of Knowledge System is useful here, if only to reconcile levels of analysis and nesting of information. I have not consumed this Sean Carroll stuff yet, but will.


Regards, 

Brent
The tree of knowledge system and the theoretical unification of psychology.-Henriques-Review of Social Psychology-2003.pdf

Alexander Bard

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Jul 13, 2017, 12:42:47 PM7/13/17
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Dear Brent

I LOVE your elaborations on this topic. I should add that while I remain a strong sceptic of panpsychism in its various forms, my dear colleague Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes's amazing work and our common favourite Alfred North Whitehead's ideas remain the main reasons why I want to explore this topic further.

And the fact that I rose the debate in both the Syntheism forum (theological) and the Metamodernism forum (political) is because the topic is of enormous interest to the groundwork of both projects. Unless we get the ontology and the metaphysics right, whatever we else we then build will be pretty naive and useless. Panpsychism deals with the very foundation of consciousness. Let's therefore not use terms like "psyche", "mind" or "consciousness" sloppily in any way whatsoever.

Best
Alexander

Alexander Bard

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Jul 14, 2017, 8:18:36 AM7/14/17
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Dear Morten

You just ended up in the same Cartesian dualism that other solipsists have ended up for the past 400 years.
So let me just be frank and then ask you what "metaphysical" means here? You use it as an axiom but you're not getting away that easily.
In what way is "metaphysical" different from "physical"? Because in philosophy they are two sides of the same coin: Physical is just the ontic and metaphysical is the ontological aspect of one and the same thing in the same monist universe of ONE substance with an enormous amount of possible attributes.
But you speak of TWO DIFFERENT SUBSTANCES here. That is just cheating, Cartesian dualist cheating. You have reintroduced "the soul" as opposed to "the body" all over again.
You have not even formulated how these two different substances communicate with each other, through which THIRD substance do they do so, et cetera, infinitely?
No, let's skip Cartesianism altogether. The fact that consciousness is PERCEIVED in a certain way proves nothing ontically, only its ontological existence. Anything beyond that assumption steps straight into Santa Claus territory. Wishful thinking (narcissism) but not philosophical or scientific rigour.
So I see no other place and role for consciousness than as a human by-product of mainly brain activities. Fine. "Finding it" materially means we need to go to further depths. But we are still chasing millions of new viruses and bactarias in the human body too. But the waves of consciousness should be found the same way "red" and "green" ended up being perceptions of certain wave lengths too. Not very mystical or metaphysical at all actually.
What we THEN need though is a new word for "the psyche" of panpsychism instead of the Darwinian emergent phenomenon called "consciousness". I have suggested "Atheos" in the "Syntheism" book with Söderqvist. The god of pure potentiality. Existence as pure proto-existence. And Atheos I can experience, in for example deep meditation, as pure and empty subjectivity.
But not as an objectice evidence since it does not have any actuality. It is a bit like seeing yourself before you think or act on something. And that's it.
Anybody here with a private brain scanner? We need to save panpsychism, if you're up for it.

Warmest greetings
Alexander

2017-07-13 22:22 GMT+02:00 Morten Overgaard <mover...@hotmail.com>:

Well-well..  "Consciousness".. One of my favorite topics..


I am neither for nor against the points presented below.. Mostly I just have a different perspective. 


You ask whether consciousness has been ever-present and whether it is somehow embedded in or inherent to the universe - plus I sense a lot of other questions tied to this debate: A lot of philosophical uncertainties and a lot of implicit assumptions taken for granted yet perceived differently by people. There are a lot of related points here lying beneath the surface, just waiting to pop up..


Well, here is my view:


If we are to start at the  beginning, then we would need to establish a somewhat commonly agreed-upon baseline or we'd be running in circles.. So for that purpose, I would say the following:


One: I am aware that I am conscious. So in that sense consciousness does exist, because I am aware. I couldn't write these words or perceive anything if I wasn't aware. It may all be a dream or a Lie, but at least I am aware. 


Two: I cannot say for certain whether other people are aware, but I believe they might be. They exhibit what seems to be the same traits of awareness that I do. 


Three: Consciousness seems to be of a non-physical, metaphysical nature. It seemingly does not have any shape, weight or location. You cannot point to where it "is"; you cannot pick it up or out and you cannot otherwise define or delineate its physical nature. It is entirely metaphysical, so it would seem.


It's a bit funny: We can measure things down to the atom-level and even smaller, but we can't find our own goddamn consciousness. We've got million-dollar programs dedicated to looking at and finding out the nature of the universe, but not equally the nature of our own consciousness or why it's here. We spend to much time and resources trying to figure out what is out there; how it's working and why, but not an equal amount trying to figure out first what is "inside". 


It's a bit of a paradox, I would say: It's a paradox that the very thing that enables us to perceive a physical world is itself non-physical. It's one of the most fundamental and overlooked paradoxes in the world; a human capacity that is just taken for granted as we move along in life, reacting to whatever captures our attention right now. And personally I think some of the greatest questions in life can be answered once we seriously try to venture down this rabbithole..


But first, and it's getting late and I am losing my energy and I also fear that people are starting to wonder "does this lead to some sort of conclusion" and, you know, I am not writing a book looking to activate people's hearts but merely writing an email.. So first, let's get back to the baseline understanding about what consciousness is:


As I pointed out above, one of the foundational assumptions should be that consciousness is seemingly of a non-physical nature. This is just an assumption of course: We can't prove that it is, we can't prove that it's not. It just seems to be that way. We would probably have found it already if it was physical, since we've managed to find so many other things. Of course it may happen that in the future some researcher actually does find our consciousness. Maybe he'll say "look folks, it's this little yellow blob right here" - and according to that logic we might be able to pick out a person's consciousness from their brains and place it on a table or even, you know, insert it into another person's head and.. (*realizes this could be a really awful science fiction movie and stops writing*)


Well I don't buy it, and I don't think our consciousness will ever be found, because it probably is of an entirely metaphysical nature. It's really the most overlooked but   obvious paradox right in front of our noses.


So, with that said, and here we are getting close to the finale: If consciousness is not physical, has it then ever been "created" and can it ever be "destroyed"? Because I think we can all agree that something which exists but is not physical cannot be "destroyed" in a physical sense, nor can it ever really be "created" in a physical sense either. Also, it cannot come from "nothing", so by necessity it would need to have always existed.


And with that said, a lot of new doors have been opened: If consciousness is metaphysical then it must always have existed. It can never have been born or created and likely it can never "die" would somehow have to reside completely outside of time as we know it, thereby probably coming dangerously close to what we understand as the "true" nature of reality.


That in my opinion lends some credibility to the whole panpsychism thing. A lot of credibility, actually. All of these are points that cannot be proved of course. Not within the logic of what we today accept as "proof", but the reasoning above does lend some credibility to the theory. If people disagree then they would have to answer this question: Is consciousness physical? If not, then what does that tell you about all the other questions..


That was my view. Thanks for raising the question, I find it quite interesting - and somehow also very related to a lot of metamodern debates.


Kaboom.



Fra: metamo...@googlegroups.com <metamodernism@googlegroups.com> på vegne af Alexander Bard <bardi...@gmail.com>
Sendt: 13. juli 2017 20:02
Til: Metamodernism
Emne: Re: Panpsychism - A spiritual and philosophical challenge
 
Well, excellent points, dear Giuseppe!
If something is emergent then it is NOT a property of what it emerges from. That is the whole point with even speaking of emergences.
And since humans emerged and did not exist at the big bang, to speak of consciousness as being ever-present (or psyche for that matter) means that we are back at the Creator-God paradigm, only this time around encapsulating all of history from The Big Bang (or The Big Bounce) and forward.
It is clearly the panpsychists who carry the burden of evidence. The fact that a corpse is overrun by bacteria is an incredibly local phenomenon aftter all.
And here panprotopsychism is just cheating one's way out of panpsychism, don't you agree?
One further question: What really is the difference between consciousness and self-consciousness?
Best intentions
Alexander

2017-07-13 19:40 GMT+02:00 'Giuseppe Dal Pra' via Metamodernism <metamodernism@googlegroups.com>:
*over processing other complex tasks.

On 13 Jul 2017, at 18:39, 'Giuseppe Dal Pra' via Metamodernism <metamo...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

It might help reaching very general levels of abstraction, since panpsychism presumes just that level of generality. 

I think an interesting route forward would be deriving from Shannon information theory a perspective of entropy 'processed' by intelligence. The act of doing so, increasingly abstractly, or into a more complex assemblage of mental relations with external entropic conditions, leads to cognition. It seems sufficient (neocortex) reasoning allows consciousness to act executively over proceeding other complex tasks. I'm not too familiar with MHC yet but from what I know it seems there are ways to stratify these according to their burgeoning complexity (at this most general level). 

But having a sliding scale does NOT necessitates presuming consciousness is ubiquitous. Are we not transposing our most ambitious intuitions of a highly connected, monist universe? It presumes too much, and in my mind explains too little to justify the leap. 

- GDP

On 12 Jul 2017, at 20:39, Daniel Görtz <gortz....@gmail.com> wrote:

Great presentation <3

2017-07-12 21:17 GMT+02:00 Brent Cooper <brent...@gmail.com>:
Contra Daniel, I would still say Wendt is required reading if you want to discuss Panpsychism, as that's a big part of his book Quantum Mind and Social Science (chapter 6). Here he does a great job explaining QMASS in video, although it probably doesn't live up to the book. Here is an ASA book review, which is good except for the fact that it cloned one of its own paragraphs halfway down(?). Here is the Google Books copy of QMASS , with a table of contents and partial preview. The whole point of the book for Wendt is to solve the mind-body problem, and thus the structure-agency problem in IR. Maybe Daniel is right, but my reading of Wendt is that he makes his argument quite conservatively, and thus its not really that dangerous to indulge.

Wendt's other main contribution is Why a World State is Inevitable. Here is a video update on that topic. While a world state is inevitable without any quantum argument at the time, this dovetails with QMASS in his argument about the state as holographic organism, in which we are all pixels or nodes. 

Regards, 

Brent

On Wed, Jul 12, 2017 at 11:13 AM, Alexander Bard <bardi...@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear Friends

If you're up for a serious philosophical and spiritual discussion in the midst of your summer vacation, I would suggest the enormously sensitive but fascinating subject of "panpsychism".

Statements like "The Universe has a subjective consciousness" makes me cringe, for the very simple reason that is is meaningless to speak of conscious subjectivity without at least a decent human brain to experience it with, and even the dumbest human being has more of a human brain than the entire so far known non-human universe. The Universe seems more content without a consciousness (or can simply afford to not have one), leaving the conscious bits to us poor human beings.

But the idea that "mind" has more to it than "human mind" arises as soon as we realise that "quantum mechanics" is a misnomer that really should be referred to as "quantum organics" and the emergent division between say chemistry and biology is not as clear-cut as we had previously assumed. It also turns out that quite a lot of amazing thinkers throughout the ages supported panpsychism one way or the other. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism

May I also suggest for the health of the debate that we just not throw opinions at each other based on loose arguements (at best) and feelings (at worst) but also try to act Devil's Advocate against our own ideas on the issue? So let's minimise the prestige and maximise the playfulness, it is after all summer in the northern hemisphere. OK?

What is "consciousness"? What is "mind"? And would there be any form of "panpsychism" that we could find if not acceptable than at least tolerable?

Best intentions
Alexander

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Daniel Ahmadpour

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Jul 14, 2017, 9:26:10 AM7/14/17
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I think one of the reasons that panpsychism is so compelling to many are because how we use the term matter is sloppy. We talk about matter as something that is experienced, that is to say we think of matter phenomenologically? When the credibility of that understanding of matter is undermined, in quantum physics or after a psychedelics experience. And the conclusions that follows from this. If there is one thing that appears to be clear about quantum physics is that it is not something that we experience, it is instead something that are measured, so quantum effects are always measured effects? And more than that, measured effects that we can't make sense of with the experiences and intuitions we use to orient ourselves in our day-to-day lives. It is thus something that is beyond phenomenology? The same thing with psychedelics, however with an interesting twist, experiences and intuitions that we can't make sense of with the experiences and intuitions we use to orient ourselves in our day-to-day lives. That is to say, the way we understand the brain, in neuroscience ect, have a particular assumptions about matter that appears to break down in quantum physics and with psychedelic experiences. What gives that assumption about matter any merits are, that it appears to work sufficiently in our day-to-day lives, when we branch out into areas where that isn't the case, matter has to be rethought. So what is matter?


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Daniel Lundberg

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Jul 14, 2017, 10:28:15 AM7/14/17
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The position that all objects got their own personal localized consciousness is not a prerequisite for the position of a conscious universe. The universe itself can still be conscious without the need of all matter having a personal consciousness (atoms, strings, chairs, a grain of sand, an ant and so on). The very quality of being/beingness without actually being anything in particular (this is the the "emptiness" people get experiental access to in peak- and plateau experiences) can be seen as the consciousness of the universe. The fact that people with their localized consciousness experience a feeling of unity with other people and nature in such experiences, when they are "empty", also points towards, from the perspective of experience, that consciousness itself permeates everything without the need of everything needing a personal consciousness (as there is from this perspective, only _one_ consciousness, that is when experienced from biology, experienced as split and localized with the ability to sense the unity with all at peak and plateu experiences. 

Saber Malmgren

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Jul 14, 2017, 12:38:49 PM7/14/17
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I understand what it means for an entity to have conscious mental states in terms of what it is like to be that entity. If there is nothing which it is like to be that entity, then that entity does not have a conscious mental state.

If panpsychism is false, then there would be nothing which it is like to be say, an atom, a rock, or the universe as a whole. Despite the fact that I find this view most plausible, there is one question that disturbs my comfortableness in this view. Would there be a difference between what it is like to exist and be an atom, rock or universe, and not exist at all?

I'm not quite satisfied with answering no to this question, but saying yes would lead to panpsychism. Do any of you have any thought on how to tackle this question?

Kind regards,
Saber

Brett Mensh

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Jul 14, 2017, 12:41:26 PM7/14/17
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yeah, atoms are not conscious.

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Saber Malmgren

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Jul 14, 2017, 12:46:29 PM7/14/17
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But wouldn't there be some way it would be different regarding what it's like to be the atom and not existing at all? I'm not saying there is, but there seem to be some way in which existence brings with it some way in which it is like to be.

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Brett Mensh

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Jul 14, 2017, 1:45:28 PM7/14/17
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nah.  it doesn’t.

Saber Malmgren

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Jul 14, 2017, 1:53:26 PM7/14/17
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How come?

Alexander Bard

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Jul 14, 2017, 3:57:05 PM7/14/17
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Dear Saber & Co

It just does not. Because NOTHING exists as a permanent "object". Listen to Brett!
If everything changes at all times - which it does - then there exist no objects per se along the timeline. Objects are after all entities FROZEN along the timeline.
What exists are merely fields of different intensities - Deleuze's great insight - and these fields come to us as phenomena (check Karen Barad's phenomenology) from which we then construct our dear "objects", our eternalisations of an ever-changing reality. We then desperately hang on to these eternalised objects because we in a Freudian manner (always check Freud) like to hang on to the ultimate eternalised object - our own reified selves (unless out mothers or fathers or gods take that role). Which do not exist either outside of our application of ourselves as the solution to the problematics of life.
So in Metzinger's ego tunnel "the ego" only appears at the end of the tunnel as the invented solution to the "unsolvable mystery" which is our relation to an ever-changing umwelt. "The self" is nothing but the brain's magical trick to construct a worldview at all, the centre of that very fantasy.
There is consequently no consciousness outside of the conscious self. And since The Universe does not have a brain and does not care about eternalising reality and trying solving problems, the hard truth is that The Universe DOES NOT NEED a consciousness. A consciousness is only needed by us fallible human beings.
You had no consciousness in your mothers' vomb precisely because it was an unproblematic perfect world. In Heaven, nobody has to think, and consequently nobody has a consciousness. Meaing the vomb as a heaven to a CONASCIOUS creature is perfect death. The longing back to the vomb is consequently - the Freudian death drive, THE MORTIDO!
Everything else is hocus pocus. And people's phenomenal experiences prove NOTHING WHATSOEVER about the world OUTSIDE of that fantasy.
Sometimes DAniel Görtz just becomes Junior Ken Wilber, too eager to please the new age crowd. But it makes for sloppy philosophy, my dear Daniel, watch out for what yuou desire when you believe such magic. It is not truth.
Any more advocates of panpsychism? r asny more spooky hidden dualisms? Give us the proper arguments then! Not your FEELINGS, that's just kids' talk, OK?

Cheerio
Alexander

How come?

nah.  it doesn’t.

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Alexander Bard

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Jul 14, 2017, 4:07:36 PM7/14/17
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Well, then you've really got a problem, dear Daniel!
Because you end "The Lstening Society" with demanding that a panpsychist worldview is a requirement for metamodernism. Just like say metamodernism is amoral while adding animal rights of all things (contradictions again) as a prerequisite for the metamodernist stance. But why is suddenly aggressive environmentalism metamodern? Why not opposition against abortions, which is also a cruelty against sentient beings in that case? Why even care about sentimentality for ethics?
And when we check how you arrived at this stance you have nothing better than your "intuition" to refer to. That's not much.
It rather looks as if you and Emil have arrived in the same la la land as the Eckhart Tolle and Ken Wilber you poke fun at (and damned rightly so) in the same chapter.
Hocus pocus sneaks back into the metamodernist worldview. Something I think both modernism and poststructuralism had got ridden of through the monist revolution from Spinoza via Hegel to Nietzsche.
So yes, let's take panpsychism seriously. I do. But where are the arguments for it? Outside of spooky personal experiences and even more longing for Nietzsche's post-phallic god-corpse?
Right now it's like talking to people who can't fathom that their near-death experiences are flukes of the brain. An EXPERIENCE PROVES NOTHING outside of that experience. Anything else is just hocus pocus. Why else even bother with science?
So what is "pan" and what is "psyche" and why should we bother with the combo?
Best intentions and tough love
Alexadner

2017-07-14 15:01 GMT+02:00 Daniel Görtz <gortz....@gmail.com>:
I can't commit to a discussion at this level of depth at the moment so I'll have to refrain from answering satisfactorily, lest I will be swallowed up time and attentionwise - each question births many more. I am, however, very sympathetic to finding a common ground on this issue, or at least exploring the relatively few positions that seem prevalent among metamodernists and syntheists.

Given how heavy weight this issue is, it should be treated in detail - I'll work with it in the future but I may need to expend several months' work to define a position I am comfortable with. It lies at the heart of our project I agree (which also makes it explosive), and at this time we may need a peace treaty on the issue so we can treat some lower order issues first. Your theology for instance I believe can be approach from both a panpsychist and non-panpsychist standpoints.

We have to admit that we have very strong intuitions here, and that these guide our reasoning. We might have to begin by mapping these different intuitions. What I agree with Morten about is that we should start from phenomenology and reason our way ahead.

Agree that me and Emil have some unresolved issues here - hopefully I can formulate a position that defends how we act in the book, if not we may have revise the theory in the future.

Exciting the conversation - love it, but low energy and much stuff going on. Grateful for you bringing it up.



2017-07-14 14:30 GMT+02:00 Alexander Bard <bardi...@gmail.com>:
In what way, Daniel?
You and Emil certainly give no direction in "The Listening Society" which truly jumps between monism and dualism as another one of the book's many contradictions.
It would be most helpful if we could find some grounding for your sometimes anti-moralist and next hyper-moralist philosophy.
Is there one substance? Or are there suddenly several and if so, how do they connect with each other? Outside of your "intuition" (which is surely not evidence for anything at all). So based on what?
Looking forward to your clarification. Especially after this sudden burst of enthusiasm for Cartesianism all of a sudden.
Morten can surely respond for himself. I'm waiting for him to explain what he means with "metaphysics". Maybe you should to?
Best intentions
Alexander

2017-07-14 0:01 GMT+02:00 Daniel Görtz <gortz....@gmail.com>:
Great post Morten. I agree that this discussion belongs largely within the boundaries of of metaphysics. I think you set the stage for the right kind of discussion and I largely share your intuitions here.

Great presentation <3


Regards, 

Brent

On Wed, Jul 12, 2017 at 11:13 AM, Alexander Bard <bardi...@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear Friends

If you're up for a serious philosophical and spiritual discussion in the midst of your summer vacation, I would suggest the enormously sensitive but fascinating subject of "panpsychism".

Statements like "The Universe has a subjective consciousness" makes me cringe, for the very simple reason that is is meaningless to speak of conscious subjectivity without at least a decent human brain to experience it with, and even the dumbest human being has more of a human brain than the entire so far known non-human universe. The Universe seems more content without a consciousness (or can simply afford to not have one), leaving the conscious bits to us poor human beings.

But the idea that "mind" has more to it than "human mind" arises as soon as we realise that "quantum mechanics" is a misnomer that really should be referred to as "quantum organics" and the emergent division between say chemistry and biology is not as clear-cut as we had previously assumed. It also turns out that quite a lot of amazing thinkers throughout the ages supported panpsychism one way or the other. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism

May I also suggest for the health of the debate that we just not throw opinions at each other based on loose arguements (at best) and feelings (at worst) but also try to act Devil's Advocate against our own ideas on the issue? So let's minimise the prestige and maximise the playfulness, it is after all summer in the northern hemisphere. OK?

What is "consciousness"? What is "mind"? And would there be any form of "panpsychism" that we could find if not acceptable than at least tolerable?

Best intentions
Alexander

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Brett Mensh

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Jul 14, 2017, 4:48:22 PM7/14/17
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 it is "like something to be" us because it has been progressively teleonomically useful for our evolving ancestors to develop the capacity to generate models of the world around them/ourselves, and our selves within it.  It is a positive feedback loop, a re-entrant system conducted by the body, mostly the brain part of the body.  We don’t have a satisfying exact explanation of the mechanism of *it feeling like something* instead of just *not* feeling, so in some sense, we are free to make up whatever fantasy we want about it; panpsychism is one such fantasy. One cannot prove that there are no dolphins on Mars.




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Alexander Bard

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Jul 15, 2017, 3:17:52 AM7/15/17
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Exactly!
Which is why we have to careful to describe this "psyche" in varying degrees to everything.
What exactly does a "psyche" mean in this case?
And while a certain zero state of consciousness is achievable as subjectless experience (I have experienced it myself) this merely proves that  the human mind is capable of producing such an experience, it does not prove in any way whatsoever that there is spomehoew some outside consciusness coming in. Merely that people miss the external God that Nietzsche killed immensely.
But so do kids miss Santa Claus after the Christmas Day experience too. Proves nothing.
So why not invent a new word other than "consciousness" for this "consciousness without self" to avoid further confusion? These are forums for philosophical and syntheological work after all, right?
Best intentions
Alexander

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Alexander Bard

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Jul 15, 2017, 4:27:11 AM7/15/17
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Correct, dear Daniel, and much agreed.
When I worked on this with Jan Söderqvist for the "Syntheism" book we took Kant's division between the phenomenal and the noumenal  very seriously (we call our phenomenological version of the Kantian divide the dialectics between eternalism and mobilism).
And what we discover in quantum physics is that what we can measure is really from the noumenal rather than the phenomenal. in this case, as long as this includes the observer too.
But what we then measure is not the "matter" or "substance" or "essence" of "materia", but rather the materiality of the pure relations that exist prior to phenomena which we then through measuring them turn into the phenomena that we can differentiate from one another. We call these "fields of intensities" and these intensities are spread unevenly in spacetime, creating more or less something versus more or less nothing for us humans when we "eternalise" these constantly changing fields. The intensities are consequently prior to the phenomena themselves.
This model makes sense both within a Whiteheadian universe, a Bohmian universe and within Bohr's quantum mechanics (which we prefer to call quantum organics, I believe Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes does the same).
But to THEN say that something "organic" is also "conscious" is a massive step and a form of cheating. So why should I go from "panorganicism" to "panpsychism"? Still beats me.
Best
Alexander

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Erik Lönroth

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Jul 15, 2017, 4:48:44 AM7/15/17
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I read this with joy. I'm not that much of a philosofer, but when I read this I wonder if "Consciousness" is something that has both an active (and passive part (more or less at the same time?)

Let me give you and example of how I think.

Imagine a situation where you are not "conscious" about a missile travelling against you with super-sonic speed. On impact, your brain does not have a chance to even register that your whole existence has seized to exist and yet, your body "consciously" dissolved itself on impact. Perhaps a good example of passive consciousness?

The active consciousness would be that if I knew that missile was inbound, I would organize my whole organism to try to avoid that impact, thus also maybe be able to change the fate of my conscious organism for a bit longer.

I seem to only be able to partially address the passive part of my consciousness and some other seems to be more or less inevitable, such as death.

/Erik


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Saber Malmgren

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Jul 15, 2017, 8:26:41 AM7/15/17
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The "entity" I was referring to in my question is a placeholder for "something", just anything at all. 
Take cats for example. There seem to be some way in which it is like to be a cat, therefore some kind of mental states are reasonably attributed to them. However, they are not conscious in the sense that they are self-conscious, at least not in a qualitatively similar way to us. So I'm not merely talking about degrees of consciousness or mental states, but only the very general statement about that there is some way in which it is like to be a cat. All talk of consciousness and mental states could here be misleading for this purpose, and if so, some other word ought to be used to specify "a way in which it is like to be" instead, but this seem to be what mental states are in fact trying to pinpoint.

Now, you make the following claim and then purport to defend it:

It just does not. Because NOTHING exists as a permanent "object".

This has nothing to do with whether or not there is some way in which it is like to be something other than human beings. Even assuming that nothing but fields of different intensity exist, the question is just as legitimate. I could've asked if there is a difference between being some field of some intensity (where this particular field is what I actually point at when I point at a rock for example) and not existing at all. (you should by the way check out super-substantivalism – the thesis that spacetime is the only fundamental substance, where matter is just some kind of aspect, property or consequence of spacetime structure). Since there obviously is some field of some intensity that gives rise of at least your own consciousness, if you have an ontology where only fields of different intensities exist, then there is some field of some intensity that can give rise to consciousness. Hence there is nothing about that ontology that undermines the question I'm asking. 

Furthermore, you write:

"The self" is nothing but the brain's magical trick to construct a worldview at all, the centre of that very fantasy.
There is consequently no consciousness outside of the conscious self. And since The Universe does not have a brain and does not care about eternalising reality and trying solving problems, the hard truth is that The Universe DOES NOT NEED a consciousness. A consciousness is only needed by us fallible human beings.

If you agree with this:

(*) Something x has some mental state if and only if there is some way in which it is like to be x.

Then it seems reasonable that not only human beings have mental states, or some sort of consciousness (but not necessarily self-awareness). Chimpanzees for example. There seem to be some way in which it is like to be a chimpanzee. Moreover, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that even dogs, parrots, corvids and octopuses are self-aware (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_consciousness). Where does the line go? How primitive does the life form have to be for there not being a way in which it is like to be it? Does the life form need some kind of world view to have such a way of being? Doesn't seem like it, to have a world view some kind of long term memory seem to be required to be able to represent anything else than what is in front of you in your mind, and there could arguably be some animals that doesn't have such a long term memory, but still a way in which it is like to be that animal. If you did not strictly mean that only human beings have consciousness (if that is what was implied by "consciousness is only needed by us fallible human beings"), then don't write it. That would be sloppy philosophy (and so is being ambiguous).
But, as soon as talk of problem solving begins, we seem to be getting close. Our (at least my) intuitions about where the line is drawn between when there is a difference between a way in which it is like to be something, and there not being such a way – seem to go hand in hand with what life forms are trying to solve some problem. So let's take a look at the question again: Would there be a difference between what it is like to exist while being a rock and not exist at all?

There still seem to be a leap between what it's like to not try to solve problems and not existing at all, but that is contentious of course. I still don't think there is any way in which it is like to be a rock, but not taking this question seriously is to not take panpsychism seriously, at least given (*) above. The point of the question is to demystify mental states at least a little bit, to try to pinpoint what it is we are looking for when we are looking for mental states or consciousness. A good step towards actually finding something is knowing what to look for. So do you agree with (*) or not? Whether rocks have a consciousness or not is not relevant for (*).

By the way, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has an entry on panpsychism with a pretty thorough mapping of different kinds of arguments that can be made for and against panpsychism, together with a bibliography of basically all the relevant literature: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/ So if anyone is serious about trying to find good philosophical arguments in this debate, this is where you need to look. If the topic was researched at some philosophy department, that's the first place they'd go and so should you. The intrinsic nature arguments were particularly interesting!

Cheers.
Saber

Brett Mensh

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Jul 15, 2017, 7:52:23 PM7/15/17
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The gasoline automobile asks:  “Does everything do internal combustion?  Do individual atoms do internal combustion somehow?”


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Sascha Jespersen

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Jul 15, 2017, 10:46:09 PM7/15/17
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Word Alexander! 100% true imho and thank you for being stubbornly clear. Besides that feelings are just for kids though. That’s just belittling - which is quite emotional too :) 


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Sascha Jespersen

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Jul 16, 2017, 2:37:59 PM7/16/17
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Agree again Alexander. I’ve experienced so many states of consciousness, also suffered severely from complete loss of self a number of times in life - what some religions choose to diagnose as enlightenment. It’s not. Its just another way of percieving – event though its extremely profound. The more we experience these phenomenons ourself (not just read out it), the more we realize that non of them are more true - or at least they are equally true. It goes in circles, and we’re back to perception is reality. Reality is nothing. 

/Sas

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Alexander Bard

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Jul 17, 2017, 5:41:03 AM7/17/17
to Syntheism, Metamodernism
Excellent points, dear Saber!
An especially in pointing out my sloppiness. So let's use the Stanford link as a common point of reference for our panpsychism and conciousness discussions.
Chimpanzees, dolphins and elephants have all been proven to be self-conscious, so they qualify as not only sentitent but also self-conscious animals.
My question though is regarding the "what is it like to be" question. That very question is asked by humans to humans and assumes human consciousness as a standard from which all other states of "what it is like to be" are asked. Most states in The Universe would never involve asking themselves any such questions. Neither cats nor rocks basically ask themselves "what it is like to be me".
So I would prefer to dig deeper into the ontological questions of what "psyche", "consciousness" or "self-consciousness" mean.
Best
Alexander

Alexander Bard

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Jul 17, 2017, 6:15:55 AM7/17/17
to Metamodernism, Syntheism
Yes!
There is no consciousness outside of material reality.
What we perceive as "consciousness" is a perception based on material reality. The brain cells, hormones, other chemicals involved are all based on atomic reality.
There is consequently no SECOND and different substance from which consciousness exists anymore than a red colour is your perception of a certain wave frequency of light.
Anything else is nothing but hocus pocus. Human narcissism in its worst and most vulgar form (I'm so special because I have consciousness, so then consciousness must be so special etc). Rtahr I agree with Oskarv here that consciousness on closer study turns out to not be very special at all. Just one Darwinian survival mechanism among thousands more.
Or as Descartes' very own students already pointed out  in the 17th century: If there was a second non-material substance through WHICH THIRD SUBSTANCE would this mystical second substance then communicate with the first material substance? Since consciousness apparently exists within and communicates with the material world.
You owe me the answer to that question, dear Morten!
Best
Alexander

2017-07-15 15:10 GMT+02:00 Morten Overgaard <mover...@hotmail.com>:

Hi Alexander


I would appreciate if you could address my original question:


A cellphone - and other physical objects - are composed of atoms, electrons and so on.


Do you believe the same to be the case for consciousness?



Fra: metamo...@googlegroups.com <metamodernism@googlegroups.com> på vegne af Alexander Bard <bardi...@gmail.com>
Sendt: 15. juli 2017 10:03

Til: Metamodernism
Emne: Re: Panpsychism - A spiritual and philosophical challenge
 
Well, it is not easy when you write that metamodernism is also "amoral" in another paragraph in the very same text. Contradiction again.
Please don't ever let empathy sneek into psychological stages theories and then make banal moralism out of it. Empathy is instinctual and not sophisticated. And feelings are not any good ground for ethics. Simply because they come and go and more often rooted in deeper trash than the beautiful aura they may carry with them at first sight.
Animal rights is a political opinion, it is not a universal ethical principle. Sentimentality does not carry any weight in ethics for a very good reason.
Animal rights have only ever developed in cultures that could afford such luxurious positions. Just like philanthropy and charity. That speaks volumes.
Best
Alexander (hunts without cruelty,  where the latter is optional, precisely for environmentalist reasons)

2017-07-15 9:51 GMT+02:00 Daniel Görtz <gortz....@gmail.com>:
No we have a light clause on panpsychism, "explore visions of" which then would exclude you exactly. Will get back on this.

When it comes to animal rights the burden of proof  lies on the folks who would like to defend the murder and exploitation of obviously sentient beings. When it comes to environmentalism it lies on folks who would like to defend certain future global crashes. So that's the easy part.


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Alexander Bard

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Jul 17, 2017, 7:42:38 AM7/17/17
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Dear All

I asked us all to also try to act "devil's advocates" towards our own stances on this incredibly interesting topic (for both metamodernists and syntheists).
My main proto-panpsychist inspiration (and my shared obsession with both Jan Söderqvist and Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes) is of course Alfred North Whitehead.
Here are text two cuts from Saber's suggested excellent Stanford text on panpsychism concerning Whitehead's "mentalist" view on physical reality. This opens up for a potentially panpsychist approach that includes radical monism, physicalism, process philosophy (so relationalist) and emergentism (my own position which I will always find superior to any panpsychism).
Although if we assume reality can not be described as neither mental nor material in its monistic unified form both panmaterialism and panpsychism are the wrong terms.
Uniprocessism might be a better term, agreed?

Feel welcome to read and discuss!
Alexander

The most significant development and defense of a panpsychist philosophy in the twentieth century was undoubtably that of Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947)[8]. Exploration of the details of Whitehead's philosophy would require an article of its own, and would be fraught with interpretive difficulties in any case since Whitehead's own presentation is forbiddingly complex, full of idiosyncratic technical terms and sometimes of dubious intelligibility. But roughly speaking Whitehead proposed a radical reform of our conception of the fundamental nature of the world, placing events (or items that are more event-like than thing-like) and the ongoing processes of their creation and extinction as the core feature of the world, rather than the traditional triad of matter, space and time. His panpsychism arises from the idea that the elementary events that make up the world (which he called occasions) partake of mentality in some—often extremely attenuated—sense, metaphorically expressed in terms of the mentalistic notions of creativity, spontaneity and perception. The echoes of Leibniz are not accidental here, and Whitehead also has a form of Leibniz's distinction between unities and mere aggregates, which he explains in these terms: “… in bodies that are obviously living, a coordination has been achieved that raises into prominence some functions inherent in the ultimate occasions. For lifeless matter these functionings thwart each other, and average out so as to produce a negligible total effect. In the case of living bodies the coordination intervenes, and the average effect of these intimate functionings has to be taken into account” (1933, p. 207; lest it seem that Whitehead is only discussing life, he is clear that this depends upon a sort of mental functioning). Unavoidably, if perhaps unfortunately, Whitehead's panpsychism stands or falls with his entire metaphysical system which entails a more radical revision of our current scientifically based picture of the world than even panpsychism necessitates. In very general terms, Whitehead's panpsychism faces the same objections as any other version, and stems from the same basic anti-emergentist intuition (for a clear introduction to, and defense of, Whitehead's panpsychism see Griffin 1998; another interpretation, and pantheistic reworking, can be found in the writings of Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000), for example, in Hartshorne 1972).

With his emphasis on the vitality and spontaneity of nature, Whitehead represents a culmination of nineteenth century panpsychist thinking, and probably not coincidentally its presentation was pretty much simultaneous with the culminating development of a robust and serious emergentism (as worked out by, for example, C. Lloyd Morgan (1852-1936) and C. D. Broad (1887-1971)). It may have seemed that, for a moment, the ground was prepared for another great battle between the two basic conflicting ideas about mind's place in the natural world. But history moved in another direction. Big science took center stage, and metaphysics became a bit player in a new kind of philosophical drama. The kind of radical emergentism espoused by thinkers such as Broad was doomed by the huge technological advances and theoretical successes of physical science, in particular quantum mechanics' victory in explaining how chemical complexity arises from purely physical principles, along with the rise of a logical positivist philosophy that derided any philosophical idea that was not cleanly rooted in empirical science. But all this also had the predictable effect of relegating panpsychism, which also required a philosophical extension of scientific belief, to the limbo of unwarranted philosophical intercession into domains beyond its expertise.

A more intriguing hope for an analogical defense of panpsychism springs from the overthrow of determinism in physics occasioned by the birth of quantum mechanics. There have been occasional attempts by some modern panpsychists, starting with Whitehead, to see this indeterminacy as an expression not of blind chance but spontaneous freedom in response to a kind of informational inclination rather than mechanical causation. This updated version of the analogy argument has the advantage that the property at issue, freedom, modelled as spontaneity and grounded in indeterminacy, can be found at the most fundamental level of the physical world. As in any analogical argument, the crux of the issue is whether the phenomena cited on the one side are sufficiently analogous to the target phenomena to warrant the conclusion that the attributes in question can be extended from the one domain to the other. In this case, we have to ask whether the indeterminacy found at the micro-level genuinely corresponds to what we take freedom to be, and this is doubtful. The indeterminacy of modern physics seems to be a pure randomness quite remote from deliberation, decision and indecision.

Ola Claësson

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Jul 18, 2017, 4:31:27 AM7/18/17
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Hey, been following this discussion with great interest and finally had some time to write some thoughts. 
  1. If you accept that OUR consciousness and how it manifest itself is a product of an evolution - what chances would it then be that the entire universe would have developed a similar consciousness? What evolutionary context might then have shaped the consciousness of the Universe=Everything? What use does EVERYTHING has for a consciousness like OURS if it is on its own - by itself? 
  2. If you do NOT accept that our consciousness is a product of evolution -  aren't we then running into tremendous problems? Are we not then supporting some sort of determinism? And what evidence do we really have that our consciousness would not have been developed in the evolutionary process, that it was destined to be this way? Isn’t the whole idea that "consciousness has always been around” just a circular argument for panpsychism?  
I am afraid that the term consciousness as we think of it is simply an anthropocentric concept - meaning that we by it are trying to apply a typical and predominantly human experience upon our surrounding, looking for trails of our selves in the universe. Therefore, humans will always be the "most conscious” of all known beings. Because the term and our definition of it is designed that way. We are limited, locked up in our bodies and brains. 

So, by asking the very question we are underestimating the variety and complexity of the universe, indirectly narrowly praising our homo sapiens brains as the blue print of something very very different. 

Most humbly, 

Ola Claësson

Vänliga hälsningar, 

Ola Claësson

Telefon: 073-870 62 14
Hemsida: averybigcat.com

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Alexander Bard

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Jul 18, 2017, 8:58:01 AM7/18/17
to Syntheism
I totally agree with you, dear Ola!
Which is why I'm an EMERGENTIST and a radical one at that and not a panpsychist.
What emerges is in principle local in space and time. It does not exist outside of the space and time where it suddenly emerges.
And consciousness is such an emergent phenomenon, like chemistry and biology before it, and the entire Universe which emerged at The Big Bang.
Evidence for anything else rests on the panpsychists and not the other way around.
Niow this opens up for the groundbreaking idea of Syntheism: God does not exist, yet. God is a possible emergent phenomenon to come.
And we can co-create God.
Best
Alexander

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Alexander Bard

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Jul 18, 2017, 9:03:18 AM7/18/17
to Metamodernism, Syntheism
The burden of evidence is totally on you, Morten!
Because everything we have found over the past 10,000 years has turned out to be totally material. Without a single exception. There is only one substance.
And you misuse the term "metaphysical" grotesquely. If you mean "spiritual" as in "non-material" than for God's sake say so. "Metaphysics" is not a substance. Never has been.
So what does consciousness really exist of? And how does it communicate with the material world? Through which third substance et cetera? Answer the questions instead of escaping them behind meaningless fludder.
Philosophy killed Descartes over 200 years ago. If you're serious about being involved in this community you owe it to the rest of us to tell us what you base your hocus pocus beliefs on. Otherwise you're not yet even modern. Even less so metamodernist.
Best intentions
Alexander

2017-07-17 21:13 GMT+02:00 Morten Overgaard <mover...@hotmail.com>:

Well we may be talking past each other I fear. I don't really believe consciousness to exist "inside" anything, as I suspect it to be entirely metaphysical - so non-applicable in a sense to the physical world - the world of atoms and electrons and so on.


I've got no proof of course, but there's no real proof the other way around either. Just the reflection that we can locate the atoms, electrons, size and weight of anything else physical, except our consciousness.







Sendt: 17. juli 2017 12:15
Til: Metamodernism; Syntheism

Emne: Re: Panpsychism - A spiritual and philosophical challenge
Yes!
There is no consciousness outside of material reality.
What we perceive as "consciousness" is a perception based on material reality. The brain cells, hormones, other chemicals involved are all based on atomic reality.
There is consequently no SECOND and different substance from which consciousness exists anymore than a red colour is your perception of a certain wave frequency of light.
Anything else is nothing but hocus pocus. Human narcissism in its worst and most vulgar form (I'm so special because I have consciousness, so then consciousness must be so special etc). Rtahr I agree with Oskarv here that consciousness on closer study turns out to not be very special at all. Just one Darwinian survival mechanism among thousands more.
Or as Descartes' very own students already pointed out  in the 17th century: If there was a second non-material substance through WHICH THIRD SUBSTANCE would this mystical second substance then communicate with the first material substance? Since consciousness apparently exists within and communicates with the material world.
You owe me the answer to that question, dear Morten!
Best
Alexander
2017-07-15 15:10 GMT+02:00 Morten Overgaard <mover...@hotmail.com>:

Hi Alexander


I would appreciate if you could address my original question:


A cellphone - and other physical objects - are composed of atoms, electrons and so on.


Do you believe the same to be the case for consciousness?




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Tom Kise

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Jul 18, 2017, 10:15:16 AM7/18/17
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I totally agree with you Alexander and Ola! Our understanding of consciousness is limited by our (unconscious) view of standing inside the very same consciousness which forms everything we experience and are conscious of (including consciousness itself). At best this would be a self referring observation of a phenomenologically entity, which then by definition cannot exist outside it's container (itself).

The only way to support a claim of panpaychism would be to base the claim on a definition of conciousness that covers both emergent and non-emergent conciousnesses - the latter could be used to support the panpsychic claim. I don't know how such a definition would look like - if meaningful constructable at all.

This reminds of one of Alexanders first questions in this thread: "What is consciousness?" Without this definition, how can we validate if the interrogation we do hits on the spot? 

Best regards
Tom Kise
Valby Langgade 155, st.
2500 Valby
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Alexander Bard

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Jul 18, 2017, 11:02:27 AM7/18/17
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Exactly, Tom!
I'm all for describing the innermost quality of physical existence as organic rather than mechanic (simply because mechanics is a metaphor we have borrowed from industry and not from nature) and for example speak of "quantum organics" rather than "quantum mechanics". This was also Whitehead's point in the 1920s.
But to jump from that to pure idealism with its deterministic idea of everything being somehow spiritual and psychic (somehow prior to its very own existence too) rather than material makes absolutely no sense.
If there is nothing sentinent about something it certainly also is not conscious. How can anything be conscious without also being sentient? Even if sentience clearly can exist without consciousness (our very own subconsciousness is evidence of that).
But let's please skip the dualist nonsense when it comes to consciousness. Making consciousness the only mystical substance in the world which is not material is just childish narcissism, the ultimate attempt at "being special children in desperate need of being acknowledged as special children".
We might as well try to save Santa Claus on December 27. Dualism regarding consciousness as opposed to materiality is the ultimate form of self-obsessed nonsense. Its a position that is so ridiculous that it can not even imagine how that consciousness substance with communicate with physical existence (which is factual). Enough said. Descartes is thankfully as dead as Jesus returning from the grave again.
It is also denying the ultimate facts of reality: Change is real and emergence is real within change. And consciousness as a human phenomenon is then an emeregence out of human biology. Nothing more and nothing less. Whether it is also a Darwinian advantage or not remains to be seen. I still think sentient but unconscious creatures like cockroaches will happily survive us. Not all emergent qualities are evolutionary advantages after all. But they are nevertheless emergences. Without biological organisms, there is no consciousness.
Best
Alexander

Brent Cooper

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Jul 18, 2017, 2:46:26 PM7/18/17
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Is it true to think of panpsychism not as 'consciousness' 'all the way down' but as the informational matrix 'all the way down' which is constituted differently at different orders of magnitude, giving way to complex emergence as we scale up? There is no consciousness above or below the level of the brain, but there is life, and quantum organics, and causation upward/downward. I found this talk on Quantum Biology quite informative. As the speaker says, the problem is not quantum physics is but what it means. 

Physics = substance
Metaphysics = substantial

QED.

Regards, 

Brent

On Tue, Jul 18, 2017 at 6:03 AM, Alexander Bard <bardi...@gmail.com> wrote:
The burden of evidence is totally on you, Morten!
Because everything we have found over the past 10,000 years has turned out to be totally material. Without a single exception. There is only one substance.
And you misuse the term "metaphysical" grotesquely. If you mean "spiritual" as in "non-material" than for God's sake say so. "Metaphysics" is not a substance. Never has been.
So what does consciousness really exist of? And how does it communicate with the material world? Through which third substance et cetera? Answer the questions instead of escaping them behind meaningless fludder.
Philosophy killed Descartes over 200 years ago. If you're serious about being involved in this community you owe it to the rest of us to tell us what you base your hocus pocus beliefs on. Otherwise you're not yet even modern. Even less so metamodernist.
Best intentions
Alexander
2017-07-17 21:13 GMT+02:00 Morten Overgaard <mover...@hotmail.com>:

Well we may be talking past each other I fear. I don't really believe consciousness to exist "inside" anything, as I suspect it to be entirely metaphysical - so non-applicable in a sense to the physical world - the world of atoms and electrons and so on.


I've got no proof of course, but there's no real proof the other way around either. Just the reflection that we can locate the atoms, electrons, size and weight of anything else physical, except our consciousness.







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Alexander Bard

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Jul 19, 2017, 4:30:04 AM7/19/17
to Metamodernism, Syntheism
Then why I even call it "panpsychism"?
The word has the wrong historical meaning and points in a completely wrong direction.
I prefer emergentism building from absolute time and quantum organics. I'm basically not a panpsychist precisely because I'm an emergentist. Nothing besides The Universe itself (and its relentless timeline) is "pan".
"Paninformationalism" or "panorganicism" are perhaps better and even more Whiteheadian terms?
Best
Alexander

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Alexander Bard

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Jul 19, 2017, 5:01:44 AM7/19/17
to Syntheism, Metamodernism
I should add a great thanks to Brent for the link to the brilliant Philip Ball lecture on quantum biology.
Please note that quantum biology is anything promises to get rid of any last remaining fantasies about "consciousness" being involved with anything non-material.
It rather strengthens monism. Regardless of whether this monism should then best be described as panpsychist or emergentist.
Where I believe Brent and I agree on the emergentist conviction. Leaving it up to science to show us which description of the "one substance" that makes best sense.
Best
Alexander

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Alexander Bard

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Jul 19, 2017, 5:05:53 AM7/19/17
to Peter Sjöstedt-H, Metamodernism, Syntheism
Most welcome, Peter!
I like "panexperientialism", following the American pragmatist tradition of semiotics from Charles Sanders Peirce on to Alfred North Whitehead, is the way forward.
Where William James's supposed sympathies for "panpsychism" (just like Schpenhauer's similar mysticism) looks more like a dead end.
Gilles Deleuze - the European Whitehead - also spoke of an universal semiotics, a "panexperientalism", free from the "panpsychism" umbrella.
I will dig into your detailed theory as soon as time allows. Much recommended to all!
Best
Alexander

2017-07-19 10:58 GMT+02:00 Peter Sjöstedt-H <pe...@philosopher.eu>:
Dear all,

Thank you for including me in this thread. I'm not sure what has been discussed, but I include this lecture introducing it which touches upon issues relating to emergentism, etc.
https://youtu.be/tFL_yPgrewA

I personally have panexperientialist (i.e. Whiteheadian panpsychological) sympathies.

Peter Sjöstedt-H






On 2017-07-19 09:30, Alexander Bard wrote:
Then why I even call it "panpsychism"?
The word has the wrong historical meaning and points in a completely
wrong direction.
I prefer emergentism building from absolute time and quantum organics.
I'm basically not a panpsychist precisely because I'm an emergentist.
Nothing besides The Universe itself (and its relentless timeline) is
"pan".
"Paninformationalism" or "panorganicism" are perhaps better and even
more Whiteheadian terms?
Best
Alexander

2017-07-18 20:46 GMT+02:00 Brent Cooper <brent...@gmail.com>:

Is it true to think of panpsychism not as 'consciousness' 'all the
way down' but as the informational matrix 'all the way down' which
is constituted differently at different orders of magnitude, giving
way to complex emergence as we scale up? There is no consciousness
above or below the level of the brain, but there is life, and
quantum organics, and causation upward/downward. I found this talk
on Quantum Biology [1] quite informative. As the speaker says, the
problem is not quantum physics _is_ but what it _means. _
-------------------------

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SENDT: 17. juli 2017 12:15
TIL: Metamodernism; Syntheism

EMNE: Re: Panpsychism - A spiritual and philosophical challenge
-------------------------

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TIL: Metamodernism
EMNE: Re: Panpsychism - A spiritual and philosophical challenge
FRA: metamo...@googlegroups.com

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<bardi...@gmail.com>
SENDT: 13. juli 2017 20:02
TIL: Metamodernism
EMNE: Re: Panpsychism - A spiritual and philosophical challenge
Quantum Mind and Social Science [2] (chapter 6). Here he does a
great job explaining QMASS in video [3], although it probably
doesn't live up to the book. Here is an ASA book review [4], which

is good except for the fact that it cloned one of its own paragraphs
halfway down(?). Here is the Google Books  [5]copy of QMASS , with a

table of contents and partial preview. The whole point of the book
for Wendt is to solve the mind-body problem, and thus the
structure-agency problem in IR. Maybe Daniel is right, but my
reading of Wendt is that he makes his argument quite conservatively,
and thus its not really that dangerous to indulge.

Wendt's other main contribution is Why a World State is Inevitable
[6]. Here is a video update [7] on that topic. While a world state
or the other. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism [8]


May I also suggest for the health of the debate that we just not
throw opinions at each other based on loose arguements (at best) and
feelings (at worst) but also try to act Devil's Advocate against our
own ideas on the issue? So let's minimise the prestige and maximise
the playfulness, it is after all summer in the northern hemisphere.
OK?

What is "consciousness"? What is "mind"? And would there be any form
of "panpsychism" that we could find if not acceptable than at least
tolerable?

Best intentions
Alexander

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Links:
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[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLeEsYDlXJk
[2] https://www.amazon.ca/Quantum-Mind-Social-Science-Unifying/dp/1107442923
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpkhPgpY28M
[4]
http://www.asatheory.org/current-newsletter-online/book-review-quantum-mind-and-social-science
[5]
https://books.google.ca/books?id=H1m3BwAAQBAJ&amp;q=panpsychism#v=snippet&amp;q=panpsychism&amp;f=false
[6] http://www.comw.org/qdr/fulltext/03wendt.pdf
[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZ5zEEy-rRc
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism
[9]
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/metamodernism/CAPgYmjVUDsmo%3DrUspHLFfsmmQXhFvZW%3DviadvSvNzz%2BS%2BfzJng%40mail.gmail.com?utm_medium=email&amp;utm_source=footer
[10] https://groups.google.com/d/optout
[11]
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/metamodernism/CAN4UEsVJmzqyxgKUBk%3DYYHnnY6Ju9AG1-x4iKyy3SW1kJvgjWg%40mail.gmail.com?utm_medium=email&amp;utm_source=footer
[12]
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[13]
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[14]
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[15]
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[16]
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[17]
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[18]
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[19]
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[20]
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[21]
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[22]
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[23]
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[24]
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[25]
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[26]
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[27]
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[28]
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Joakim.grundh

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Jul 19, 2017, 10:11:14 AM7/19/17
to synt...@googlegroups.com
Hello to you all!

Excuse my quick and rather long post here, and sorry if I haven't informed myself on all of the correspondances, my feed give me what goes to the Syntheist box. Feel free to point out if I miss the geist of this discussion.

To Alexander: "Because everything we have found over the past 10,000 years has turned out to be totally material"
I am not sure what this materiality is refering to. Is it the idea that the particles of "atomism" are the carriers of the veil we've clad our perceptions into identities through? Is it the externality we give priority when talking about the "real", or "ontological", properties of the world?

I ask this since we could turn it around and say that we have found nothing material but only mental. This in the same manner that a "thing of old" never can prove that the time we need to give the property of being old is real, it only shows that there are things hic en nunc that stands in relations to other things hic en nunc that begs for a cathegorical difference to specify certain attributes of said things.

I find that "materialism" is a sneaky word, especially when it comes to philosophy and its ontology. It is many times taken with a prima facie definition that shrouds and cover that it is an offshoot of the cathegory of "realism". And today I would argue that through the process-oriented narrative of the real, materialism has weaker than ever position. This since we can have multiple models of how the reality-ideality question is solved, while still not subscribing to an idea of the atomistic, or materialistic, proposition is assumed valid. We might talk about fields or any kind of energy formation that is not discrete but rather continual in relation to concepts like time, or the instanse for observance, measuring etc.

Heidegger refution of the very question of reality/ideality comes to mind also. Why is the truth of the conception of reality/ideality even relevant whichever way it would be? And isn't the materiality of "reality" something that is hindersome to the attempts to give a monistic ontological model?

To all: (Tom Kise "The only way to support a claim of panpaychism would be to base the claim on a definition of conciousness that covers both emergent and non-emergent conciousnesses")

I think that the point Sartre makes about conciousness is very relevant. He points out that there is no ground for talking of conciousness in and of itself. It always has an object. There is always the direction of <<concious off>> rather than something having the property of "conciousness" in and by itself.

And with that in consideration we might ask ourself if an detector of light are not concious of the precense or absense of light regardless of any higher faculties.

When viewed as such conciousness is not some magical quality but rather something obviously stemming from relational properties of differences.
And we can give description of non-biological processes as being concious.

The other thing I would like to point out is on our conceptions of identity. I remembered enjoying Adornos critique against the "identitarians" that he suggested mis-interpreted Kant. I can't give a full account on that. But it seems well worth thinking of what these identities would be that we try to pin conciousness on. And maybe we should start by trying to settle wheter conciousness is a logically contingent or necessary.

We could even go further here and question our cathegories of differences. And ask ourself if there isn't always a need for a mediating third to even distinguis in between the two differentiated. I:e the conciousness, and that which is concious.
I agree with previous calls for clearity in the terms and concepts used here. And I belive the architecture of our language in relation to these very base conceptions of identity, object/subject etc will show the need for both dualism and monism, depending on where/how you are to formulate your question.

Now I can't really see the relevance for this question of panpsychism, if it is true or not. But if it is in relation to the old question in regards to free will etc, then I propose that we turn the question around. And ask what would be needed for a free agent to be able to act, on its own volition, upon a world determined by laws of causation. (Or we could drop the assumption of a law bound universe also, but that tends to complicate the matters even more).

My solution to this is to say that what the single entity need to do to be able to act upon a reality instead of just act out of a reality is first to create a non-real representation for the percieved reality to enact that which has found to be law bound. (The amount of relational configurating reciever/sender nodes we have determines the total amount of representation).

To see how this is needed one has to consider spatially transitory events like movements of objects and the catching of them. To catch something where it is you need to place yourself at the place where it will be. Even if it is only a part of you, the hand, it still need co--ordination, to sucessfully grasp the ball or object. You have to project the comming, not yet real, position of a thing.
Now here we can see that many times this is not done by what we call concious efforts, it has been subsumed under non-cognizant processes (acting upon themselves), so that the concius effort is to catch it, and un-consiously something makes all the relevant asumptions and relations in regards to the task.

From that point of view we see the need for a "veil of maya", or different levels of cognition, creating temporarily conciousnesses.

I feel us being a bit like the drog trying to catch its own tail running around our own central axis. Instead of accepting that somthing we call conciousness exists, and that we become it now and then, we wanna be concious of our becomming concious. We identify with the identifier, instead of with the one who uses the identifier, and the identified, to make a relation. We become "identitarians" and take the nouminal, that thought of, to be the real, instead of seeing that the nouminal is the stand in ideated projected upon the nominal "thing-in-itself".


For a pure linguistic comment I would say that panpsychism would never lead me to think about everything as being concious, but rather being "be-souled". Psyche being related to the soul, and not some conciousness. And today it could be taken as something stating that the law is not without anything, but rather within something. This would only come from the assumption of law as essential and not contingent upon the cognition of it. There is no one outside of things acting upon them, but the principles for how things relate to each other are within them. Thus making the cathegory a useful tool in the de-deification of reality giving room for a non-material realism, instead of sinking the question of realism/idealism into a trench where the latter side always need a god.

-----Originalmeddelande-----
Från: "Alexander Bard" <bardi...@gmail.com>
Till: Metamodernism <metamo...@googlegroups.com>
Kopia: Syntheism <synt...@googlegroups.com>
Datum: 2017-07-18 15:03
Ämne: {Syntheism} Re: Panpsychism - A spiritual and philosophical challenge
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Alexander Bard

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Jul 19, 2017, 6:29:57 PM7/19/17
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Quick response:

1. Forget materialism or mentalism, let's just admit that we have arrived at radical monism. Whatever that ONE substance consists of or how it is best described.
2. Free will? My response is: Why even combine freedom and will? Free will is just Christianity's desire to morally judge us in reverse (so as to be able to do it). I'm fine with will and I'm fine with freedom. Maybe even with free choice. But free will is just the most overrated philosophical issue ever.

Best
Alexander

Till: Metamodernism <metamodernism@googlegroups.com>

Kopia: Syntheism <synt...@googlegroups.com>
Datum: 2017-07-18 15:03
Ämne: {Syntheism} Re: Panpsychism - A spiritual and philosophical challenge


The burden of evidence is totally on you, Morten!
Because everything we have found over the past 10,000 years has turned out to be totally material. Without a single exception. There is only one substance.
And you misuse the term "metaphysical" grotesquely. If you mean "spiritual" as in "non-material" than for God's sake say so. "Metaphysics" is not a substance. Never has been.
So what does consciousness really exist of? And how does it communicate with the material world? Through which third substance et cetera? Answer the questions instead of escaping them behind meaningless fludder.
Philosophy killed Descartes over 200 years ago. If you're serious about being involved in this community you owe it to the rest of us to tell us what you base your hocus pocus beliefs on. Otherwise you're not yet even modern. Even less so metamodernist.
Best intentions
Alexander
2017-07-17 21:13 GMT+02:00 Morten Overgaard <mover...@hotmail.com>:

Well we may be talking past each other I fear. I don't really believe consciousness to exist "inside" anything, as I suspect it to be entirely metaphysical - so non-applicable in a sense to the physical world - the world of atoms and electrons and so on.


I've got no proof of course, but there's no real proof the other way around either. Just the reflection that we can locate the atoms, electrons, size and weight of anything else physical, except our consciousness.







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Alexander Bard

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Jul 20, 2017, 5:59:05 AM7/20/17
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Thanks, Peter, but Jaegwon Kim is wrong here.
Mistaking emergence for phase transition does not help us forward.
The thing is this: Emergence as a concept is tied precisely to Whitehead's and Bohm's fundamental idea of radical presentism (as opposed to Plato's, Kant's, Einstein's and the Hindu's eternalism): Each moment is a novelty and is the only thing tha carries true ontic validity. In this sense, Whitehead's and Bohm's point is that each moment is EMERGENT from the previous.
And time does NOT run backwards. So Kim's idea of emergence going downward is just dead wrong. It is not emergence at all.
Emergentism rather REQUIRES a chronocentric process philosophy to work at all. Whitehead is the ultimate emergentist monist.
And THIS is precisely where I'm OK with discussing this one Whiteheadian substance as proto-organic if you like.
This is also how I read Whitehead myself. As does Wikipedia.
Best
Alexander

2017-07-20 11:16 GMT+02:00 Peter Sjöstedt-H <pe...@philosopher.eu>:
Dear Alexander, Daniel, et al.,

The meaning of 'emergence' which I attack is one well explicated by Jaegwon Kim. Of course this meaning may (probably does) differ from yours Alexander.

Here is one (of many) of Kim's papers on emergence, one which that presents the 'core concepts and issues': http://www.philosopher.eu/emergence-core-ideas-and-issues/

More to follow...

Sincerely,

Peter











On 2017-07-19 10:08, Daniel Görtz wrote:
I sincerely recommend this talk with Peter, it's very good.


2017-07-19 10:58 GMT+02:00 Peter Sjöstedt-H <pe...@philosopher.eu>:

Dear all,

Thank you for including me in this thread. I'm not sure what has
been discussed, but I include this lecture introducing it which
touches upon issues relating to emergentism, etc.
https://youtu.be/tFL_yPgrewA

I personally have panexperientialist (i.e. Whiteheadian
panpsychological) sympathies.

Peter Sjöstedt-H

On 2017-07-19 09:30, Alexander Bard wrote:
Then why I even call it "panpsychism"?
The word has the wrong historical meaning and points in a completely
wrong direction.
I prefer emergentism building from absolute time and quantum
organics.
I'm basically not a panpsychist precisely because I'm an
emergentist.
Nothing besides The Universe itself (and its relentless timeline) is
"pan".
"Paninformationalism" or "panorganicism" are perhaps better and even
more Whiteheadian terms?
Best
Alexander

2017-07-18 20:46 GMT+02:00 Brent Cooper <brent...@gmail.com>:

Is it true to think of panpsychism not as 'consciousness' 'all the
way down' but as the informational matrix 'all the way down' which
is constituted differently at different orders of magnitude, giving
way to complex emergence as we scale up? There is no consciousness
above or below the level of the brain, but there is life, and
quantum organics, and causation upward/downward. I found this talk
on Quantum Biology [1] quite informative. As the speaker says, the
problem is not quantum physics _is_ but what it _means. _

-------------------------

FRA: metamo...@googlegroups.com <metamo...@googlegroups.com>

på vegne af Alexander Bard <bardi...@gmail.com>
SENDT: 17. juli 2017 12:15
TIL: Metamodernism; Syntheism

EMNE: Re: Panpsychism - A spiritual and philosophical challenge
-------------------------

FRA: metamo...@googlegroups.com <metamo...@googlegroups.com>

på vegne af Alexander Bard <bardi...@gmail.com>
SENDT: 15. juli 2017 10:03

TIL: Metamodernism
EMNE: Re: Panpsychism - A spiritual and philosophical challenge
FRA: metamo...@googlegroups.com

<metamo...@googlegroups.com> på vegne af Alexander Bard
<bardi...@gmail.com>
SENDT: 13. juli 2017 20:02
TIL: Metamodernism
EMNE: Re: Panpsychism - A spiritual and philosophical challenge
Quantum Mind and Social Science [2] (chapter 6). Here he does a
great job explaining QMASS in video [3], although it probably
doesn't live up to the book. Here is an ASA book review [4], which

is good except for the fact that it cloned one of its own paragraphs
halfway down(?). Here is the Google Books  [5]copy of QMASS , with

a
table of contents and partial preview. The whole point of the book
for Wendt is to solve the mind-body problem, and thus the
structure-agency problem in IR. Maybe Daniel is right, but my
reading of Wendt is that he makes his argument quite conservatively,
and thus its not really that dangerous to indulge.

Wendt's other main contribution is Why a World State is Inevitable
[6]. Here is a video update [7] on that topic. While a world state
or the other. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism [1] [8]


May I also suggest for the health of the debate that we just not
throw opinions at each other based on loose arguements (at best) and
feelings (at worst) but also try to act Devil's Advocate against our
own ideas on the issue? So let's minimise the prestige and maximise
the playfulness, it is after all summer in the northern hemisphere.
OK?

What is "consciousness"? What is "mind"? And would there be any form
of "panpsychism" that we could find if not acceptable than at least
tolerable?

Best intentions
Alexander

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Links:
------
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLeEsYDlXJk [22]
[2]

https://www.amazon.ca/Quantum-Mind-Social-Science-Unifying/dp/1107442923
[23]
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpkhPgpY28M [24]
[4]

http://www.asatheory.org/current-newsletter-online/book-review-quantum-mind-and-social-science
[25]
[5]

https://books.google.ca/books?id=H1m3BwAAQBAJ&amp;q=panpsychism#v=snippet&amp;q=panpsychism&amp;f=false
[26]
[6] http://www.comw.org/qdr/fulltext/03wendt.pdf [27]
[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZ5zEEy-rRc [28]
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism [1]
[9]

https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/metamodernism/CAPgYmjVUDsmo%3DrUspHLFfsmmQXhFvZW%3DviadvSvNzz%2BS%2BfzJng%40mail.gmail.com?utm_medium=email&amp;utm_source=footer
[29]
[10] https://groups.google.com/d/optout [3]
[11]

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[30]
[12]

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[31]
[13]

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[32]
[14]

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[47]

--
www.philosopher.eu [48]


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Links:
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism
[2]
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/metamodernism/CAPgYmjVUDsmo%3DrUspHLFfsmmQXhFvZW%3DviadvSvNzz%2BS%2BfzJng%40mail.gmail.com
[3] https://groups.google.com/d/optout
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[5]
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[6]
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/metamodernism/C2401997-6E14-4EBE-B0DD-46078E0A1E2E%40yahoo.co.uk
[7]
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/metamodernism/E0EF896F-05F8-468D-8AB6-D807E7EC64E0%40yahoo.co.uk
[8]
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/metamodernism/CAPgYmjXDy5uRgROEyiJ3wGu6QTun_bd8OX7rWuGWBfT6V%3D_osg%40mail.gmail.com
[9]
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[10]
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[11]
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[12]
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[13]
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[14]
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[15]
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[16]
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[17]
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[18]
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[19]
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[20]
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/metamodernism/CAN4UEsV-jZ_PdwaujB2i5YVd%3DtGZTDdpDTTcxCMMNS7NWdX7zg%40mail.gmail.com
[21]
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[22] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLeEsYDlXJk
[23] https://www.amazon.ca/Quantum-Mind-Social-Science-Unifying/dp/1107442923
[24] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpkhPgpY28M
[25]
http://www.asatheory.org/current-newsletter-online/book-review-quantum-mind-and-social-science
[26]
https://books.google.ca/books?id=H1m3BwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;q=panpsychism#v=snippet&amp;amp;q=panpsychism&amp;amp;f=false
[27] http://www.comw.org/qdr/fulltext/03wendt.pdf
[28] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZ5zEEy-rRc
[29]
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Spiritual Naturalist Society

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Jul 31, 2017, 3:43:11 PM7/31/17
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Hello everyone :)

I hope you have been well. I happened to catch your recent discussion on Panpsychism and reviewed the communications to date. I figured I would give my thoughts.

I agree with Alexander that we must define our terms and I suspect we are all thinking different things when we're using the word 'consciousness'.

When I use it, I do not mean it to necessarily require:
- Linguistic, intentional, or directed thought about things (logical operations)
- A sense of self, self awareness, or ideas about the 'self'
- Memories or opinions
- Emotions, feelings, impulses, or instincts

Rather, I mean a very core and fundamental, basic experience of experience. Some kind of first-person state of "what it is like" to be something. David Chalmers describes this as "qualia". If you clear your mind and are familiar with reaching non-language/thinking states of being in meditation, you may have a better idea of what I mean. A simple "what it is like" to "be". Consciousness, without regard to any particular object OF consciousness - the canvas on which consciousness paints, not the objects in the picture.

So, if you have no memories you can still be conscious. If you have no thoughts about particular things, you can still be conscious. If you are not self aware and have no thought about yourself or a 'self' you can still be conscious. You can still be an "experiencing thing" if there are any sensory inputs coming in at all and you are aware of them - even if only aware and not judging, categorizing, or handling that input in any way. You are, yet, different from if those sensory inputs were going into an empty box or onto a computer disk or into a bucket of random protein goo, because something is having an experience.

This may not be what you mean by consciousness. It is not important that we agree - only that you are aware this is what I mean in the following when I say things using that word...

Dan Dennett described neural mechanisms and claimed this proved consciousness a delusion. But even if he has successfully described the mechanism of how something can be 'tricked' into thinking it is having a conscious experience - the very trick itself is the consciousness he is claiming doesn't exist. To experience a delusion is to experience. So, the notion that consciousness can be a delusion (a trick to the consciousness) is circular and, by definition, impossible.

The question remains, why should any process involving matter interacting with matter, ever produce even the delusion of conscious experience?

I Agree with Sean Carroll that quantum mechanics is likely well below the level of the complex systems from which consciousness emerge, and needn't be brought into the discussion of consciousness until or unless there is some specific requirement for it that meets the requirements of parsimony.


My general impression is similar to Nick's but with perhaps a small adjustment. I would say that as a naturalist (materialist), if we conclude that consciousness is real at all, then we must also conclude that there is nothing magical making up the atoms of the human brain. And so, if it can exist there, then it must be *capable* of existing in other places - not that it necessarily does.

This addresses Alexander's excellent point that, if consciousness is an emergent property of biological brains exclusively, then it most certainly would not exist throughout the universe on a multitude of levels or as a whole (Panpsychism).

BUT...

The simple fact is that:
(1) IF we accept that consciousness is real (I do) and
(2) IF we accept that it is an emergent property (I strongly suspect this)...

THEN

We still do not know from what it emerges precisely.

It seems unlikely that consciousness arises solely in human brains, or even biological brains - simply because they are brains.

It may be that there is a certain level of complexity a system must have before consciousness arises. If so, then it could be that it just so happens that only biological brains in the universe have the sufficient level of complexity and type of complexity to allow for the emergence of first-person experience. If this is true, then biological brains may be the only conscious things, but an artificial system could, in theory, be constructed that would also be conscious.

OR...

It could be that the level of complexity required for a first-person sensation of experience to arise is lower than the level of brains.

We know from human brain injuries and other data, that humans can report various levels and kinds of consciousness. In other words, it's not just "on" or "off". Consciousness is very WEIRD and can exist in many kinds of diffused, segmented, dreamlike, or rudimentary forms. Consciousness is more likely a finely incremental phenomenon.

Giulio Tononi has developed the "Integrated Information Theory" of consciousness (IIT). By his reconing, there is a certain type of integrration of information nested within a complex system, that can correspond to a measure of consciousness.  The math for this, if applied to a brain, would be so complex that it can really only be applied as a thought experiment. But it does seem to correspond accurately to measurements of human brains in different states and what those humans report in terms of their own consciousness.

If there is anything to this model, then it is noteworthy that levels of complexity and integration of information far simpler than human brains yield a 'consciousness rating' that is greater than zero.

So, it could be that only brains have the complexity such that anything close to what we can relate to as *HUMAN consciousness* can emerge - BUT, that some extremely rudimentary forms of dreamlike, unthinking and unreportable, first-person-like 'experience of being' takes place in thermostats, societies, ecosystems, storms, galaxies, etc.

It could even be that the first time two pieces of matter became locked into a reciprocal cause-effect relationship that the simplest form of consciousness was born. As extraordinary as such a claim would be (which I'm not making), the simple fact is that we find ourselves in a situation where all possibilities seem to be extraordinary.

Unfortunately, 'unreportable' levels of subjective experience means *immeasurable*, which means no scientifically valid statement can be made about it. It would simply not be a scientific matter. In fact, even if a storm could report to us its experience it would still be immeasurable. Just as we cannot prove whether a storm has an experience, we cannot even prove to one another in scientifically valid ways that either of us are having one. We are each only assuming the other is having a similar first-person experience. This doesn't make it a supernatural matter, but it may simply be that science is not a tool that can fully and completely assess all aspects of reality with consistency to its own standards. Science is an inherently 'third person' endeavor. The description of the sunset will never be the experience of the sunset, let alone the sunset.

In other words, science is our best and only real tool to understand reality intellectually, but we and our science may be limited in capacity. This, in fact, seems likely to me. The question remains - what makes something have a sense of experience? And, how would we know if or when we have the right answer to that question? Regardless, it's answer would determine whether only we are conscious or whether it exists in other places too, or even everywhere. No amount of philosophizing will get us past that wall.

I, for one, tend to think of complex systems as entities with causative, emergent, properties and it seems that people who recognize and respect them tend to have wiser dispositions and more careful actions in the world - so long as they do not forget to admit their assumption is just that, and veer into idolatry, dogmatism, or hubris.

Sincerely,
Daniel


On Wed, Jul 12, 2017 at 1:13 PM, Alexander Bard <bardi...@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear Friends

If you're up for a serious philosophical and spiritual discussion in the midst of your summer vacation, I would suggest the enormously sensitive but fascinating subject of "panpsychism".

Statements like "The Universe has a subjective consciousness" makes me cringe, for the very simple reason that is is meaningless to speak of conscious subjectivity without at least a decent human brain to experience it with, and even the dumbest human being has more of a human brain than the entire so far known non-human universe. The Universe seems more content without a consciousness (or can simply afford to not have one), leaving the conscious bits to us poor human beings.

But the idea that "mind" has more to it than "human mind" arises as soon as we realise that "quantum mechanics" is a misnomer that really should be referred to as "quantum organics" and the emergent division between say chemistry and biology is not as clear-cut as we had previously assumed. It also turns out that quite a lot of amazing thinkers throughout the ages supported panpsychism one way or the other. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism

May I also suggest for the health of the debate that we just not throw opinions at each other based on loose arguements (at best) and feelings (at worst) but also try to act Devil's Advocate against our own ideas on the issue? So let's minimise the prestige and maximise the playfulness, it is after all summer in the northern hemisphere. OK?

What is "consciousness"? What is "mind"? And would there be any form of "panpsychism" that we could find if not acceptable than at least tolerable?

Best intentions
Alexander

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Brent Cooper

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Jul 31, 2017, 5:50:10 PM7/31/17
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I thought this would be useful for both threads. No mention of panpsychism but it concerns MM and religion. Unfortunately I've not yet read it, but it looks promising.

"Towards a metamodern academic study of religion and a more religiously informed metamodernism"

http://www.hts.org.za/index.php/HTS/article/view/4491/html

Regards, 

Brent

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/metamodernism/CAPgYmjUt2NtUvC7kpHkn%2B638%3DoK3BGemv1yLkLYH6Cko6kWm8w%40mail.gmail.com.

Alexander Bard

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Aug 1, 2017, 7:27:29 AM8/1/17
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Dear Daniel

Excellent summary of your most interesting ideas.
But if you run off with this very wide definition of "consciousness", then what is "sentience"?
Also, no matter what we experience during meditation, the "empty consciousness" you describe (and I do know what you mean having had the same experience) is still a consciousness that occurs within a field of memory and expectation, it is really no more "empty" than a near-death experience is real death. It is just experienced as "empty", as if the "self" has temporarily gone into hiding and become subconscious.
So I prefer to speak of "sentience" here rather than "consciousness".
And there is no "should" to any emergences. Emergences do not have to have neither plans nor reasons. Emergences just happen. Consciousness is an emergence from organisms with large brains and neural systems. And as such it is expensive to develop and carry around, but apparently it is still an evolutionary winner since conscious human beings are in abundance. If they don't use their consciousness to also kill themselves as a speices.
Systems have experiences, clesrly, but having a sense of experience, being sentient, is not the same as being conscious.
Your very own subconsciousness is a perfect example of a system that is sentient but clearly not conscious.
Maybe the way forward is then to study the dfference between a pure meditative and passive consciousness and a very active subconsciousness?

Warmest greetings
Alexander

On Wed, Jul 12, 2017 at 1:13 PM, Alexander Bard <bardi...@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear Friends

If you're up for a serious philosophical and spiritual discussion in the midst of your summer vacation, I would suggest the enormously sensitive but fascinating subject of "panpsychism".

Statements like "The Universe has a subjective consciousness" makes me cringe, for the very simple reason that is is meaningless to speak of conscious subjectivity without at least a decent human brain to experience it with, and even the dumbest human being has more of a human brain than the entire so far known non-human universe. The Universe seems more content without a consciousness (or can simply afford to not have one), leaving the conscious bits to us poor human beings.

But the idea that "mind" has more to it than "human mind" arises as soon as we realise that "quantum mechanics" is a misnomer that really should be referred to as "quantum organics" and the emergent division between say chemistry and biology is not as clear-cut as we had previously assumed. It also turns out that quite a lot of amazing thinkers throughout the ages supported panpsychism one way or the other. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism

May I also suggest for the health of the debate that we just not throw opinions at each other based on loose arguements (at best) and feelings (at worst) but also try to act Devil's Advocate against our own ideas on the issue? So let's minimise the prestige and maximise the playfulness, it is after all summer in the northern hemisphere. OK?

What is "consciousness"? What is "mind"? And would there be any form of "panpsychism" that we could find if not acceptable than at least tolerable?

Best intentions
Alexander

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Joakim.grundh

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Aug 3, 2017, 11:18:15 AM8/3/17
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Hello again you caught my interest with this discussion.

I think it would be interesting to ask whether all humans can be said to be conscious? And is there a scale to it, so that one could be said to be MORE or LESS conscious?

Also; have you ever come across the idea of conciousness as a sense, like our sense of smell and sight?

If one work with a concept such as that consciousness does not become something primary for the organism but is rather on par with the senses. One could also join this idea to ideas about different kind of conciousness stemming from different bodily centers, the triple centers of the brain, the hearth and the gut for instance. So that we term concicousness an aggregate of internal relations in a organism.

It seem that we should define our terms in a way that leaves the question of panpsychism open. If an amoeba can navigate a maze to find its sustenance, should we not grant it consciousness? It has a need, something that fills that need, and act to get that something that fills its needs.
Do we not make unreasonable or antropocentric claims on consciousness if we definie it as something that needs complexity, multiple cells etc? And by doing that only come to a semanatical refutation of panpsychism, or more specific the thruth of "concioussness" and "panpsychism" in combination.

/Joakim

-----Originalmeddelande-----
Från: "Alexander Bard" <bardi...@gmail.com>
Till: Syntheism <synt...@googlegroups.com>
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Datum: 2017-08-01 13:27
Ämne: {Syntheism} Panpsychism - A spiritual and philosophical challenge
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Alexander Bard

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Aug 3, 2017, 12:31:46 PM8/3/17
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Yes, I agree, Joakim, very good questions indeed.
To begin with, I think that we can safely arrive at the conclusion that neither "psyche" nor "materia" describes the nature of existence adequatly. I have proposed "quantum organics" instead as a more provovative but also productive term., It is very Whiteheadian, needless to say.
But we can conclude that we always return to ONE substance consisting of an enormous number of connections. So I propose radical monism.
But what that one substance is remains mysterious and is still a question for the philosophy of physics to resolve.
And I also still lack an imprtant clarification of the difference between sentience and consciousness.
What is consciousness outside of self-cionsciousness if not merely sentience?
The debate would gain a lot of credibility if we stayed with the concept of sentience until we really have a reason to speak of that Darwinian mutation called consciousness.
But no, we gain nothing by throwing consciousness into the category of a sense. Those are my ten cents.
Best
Alexander (ready to accept panorganicism or panpriocessism but not panpsychism)

2017-08-03 17:18 GMT+02:00 Joakim.grundh <joakim...@blixtmail.se>:
Hello again you caught my interest with this discussion.

I think it would be interesting to ask whether all humans can be said to be conscious? And is there a scale to it, so that one could be said to be MORE or LESS conscious?

Also; have you ever come across the idea of conciousness as a sense, like our sense of smell and sight?

If one work with a concept such as that consciousness does not become something primary for the organism but is rather on par with the senses. One could also join this idea to ideas about different kind of conciousness stemming from different bodily centers, the triple centers of the brain, the hearth and the gut for instance. So that we term concicousness an aggregate of internal relations in a organism.

It seem that we should define our terms in a way that leaves the question of panpsychism open. If an amoeba can navigate a maze to find its sustenance, should we not grant it consciousness? It has a need, something that fills that need, and act to get that something that fills its needs.
Do we not make unreasonable or antropocentric claims on consciousness if we definie it as something that needs complexity, multiple cells etc? And by doing that only come to a semanatical refutation of panpsychism, or more specific the thruth of "concioussness" and "panpsychism" in combination.

/Joakim

-----Originalmeddelande-----
Från: "Alexander Bard" <bardi...@gmail.com>
Till: Syntheism <synt...@googlegroups.com>
Kopia: Metamodernism <metamodernism@googlegroups.com>

Datum: 2017-08-01 13:27
Ämne: {Syntheism} Panpsychism - A spiritual and philosophical challenge
Dear Daniel

Excellent summary of your most interesting ideas.
But if you run off with this very wide definition of "consciousness", then what is "sentience"?
Also, no matter what we experience during meditation, the "empty consciousness" you describe (and I do know what you mean having had the same experience) is still a consciousness that occurs within a field of memory and expectation, it is really no more "empty" than a near-death experience is real death. It is just experienced as "empty", as if the "self" has temporarily gone into hiding and become subconscious.
So I prefer to speak of "sentience" here rather than "consciousness".
And there is no "should" to any emergences. Emergences do not have to have neither plans nor reasons. Emergences just happen. Consciousness is an emergence from organisms with large brains and neural systems. And as such it is expensive to develop and carry around, but apparently it is still an evolutionary winner since conscious human beings are in abundance. If they don't use their consciousness to also kill themselves as a speices.
Systems have experiences, clesrly, but having a sense of experience, being sentient, is not the same as being conscious.
Your very own subconsciousness is a perfect example of a system that is sentient but clearly not conscious.
Maybe the way forward is then to study the dfference between a pure meditative and passive consciousness and a very active subconsciousness?

Warmest greetings
Alexander



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Keric Travis den Breeijen

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Aug 7, 2017, 4:51:07 PM8/7/17
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Hey, Alex et al---

I'm gonna have to switch metasystems or even paradigms to address things from this angle of entertaining-it-as-if-it-were-relevant (as opposed/tangent/complementary to the one I took in just-MM thread where I said panpsychism as something to spend on is "premature at best and irrelevant at worst").

You can usually tell something is extraneous when even the greatest minds from many different fields discuss it and nearly all discussion eventually end up begging more questions than they answered simultaneous with contextual language being stilted to a point where it's 20 steps REMOVED from the ontic, rather than extrapolated into an epistemological total and then simply BRACKETED with intense scrutiny on identify the relevant .

Things haven't gotten stilted and schizoid, but when I take the inquiry seriously, I still am not able to put more deliberate energy in to surpass that of the automatic insistence screaming at me "Actually, there are more viable candidates to search for to explain (pan-)fractal symmetry that have what I call 'Antecedents in the ontic".  Consciousness has been so subject to.... well, subjects who felt it a worthy notion to... subjectivize...... that it no longer has any (well-known or coherently-presented) antecedents  in the ontic.  The antecedents to the more active discussions don't even start from epistemology, rather just pay lip service to it before forking right into the nearest extant, popular ontology.

And some of those ontologies have very few antecedents in the ontic to justify fitting them as frames for this literally universe-wide proposed Thing, and since they get enculturated so easily by the status quo, they basically become (almost) immune to what I called "extrapolation to an epistemological total".


So, any constructed philosophy process for this topic should focus on epistemological analysis combined with phenomenological reduction, or it probably will just circle a drain (a workable process focused on ontology for the topic) that might not even exist.

I would say this question would be better tackled by a subgroup that commits to developing a process to frame the discussion, and then they can act as guardrails to keep discussion from devolving into "Well, my Baby likes their panpsychism this way when I pour it into their sippy-cup." <<Well, that formulation gives my Baby an upset tummy.>> THIS BABY IS A SAVANT BODHISATTVA WATCH OUR BABY ENJOY **THIS** FORMULATION!!

"But, like, isn't all of this, like, subjective, bruh?"
<<Yea, bruh, fuck this let's talk about something else.>>

//proceeds to another topic, where they also bring their overgrown Babies.//


---Keric

P.S. That wasn't an assessment of the current atmosphere in here. More like a forecast of a 60% chance of flooding Babies if we don't build a better foundation.

Keric Travis den Breeijen

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Aug 7, 2017, 5:31:39 PM8/7/17
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In defense of feelings, but also in defense of fuck-your-feelings,

Barring any blatant abuse or overwhelming ostracizing, outside of informal interpersonal relationships, addressing feelings in any way other than the didactic is likely to create... ironically... emotional dysregulation in the participants, so it'd be a vicious cycle.

If you work from an ethic of care, even, you'd  see that varying degrees of emotional sterility partially prevent conversations from becoming toxic.  The only thing that is toxic is a very literal, unironic Fuck-Your-Feelings. Because if its unironic, you are saying "I have bad feelings in relation to you displaying your feelings." In which case you'd have to ... go fuck yourself. xD
Great presentation <3


Regards, 

Brent

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De bedste hilsner

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KREATIV DIREKTØR
 
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Joakim.grundh

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Aug 8, 2017, 7:58:19 AM8/8/17
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"But no, we gain nothing by throwing consciousness into the category of a sense. Those are my ten cents.
Best
Alexander (ready to accept panorganicism or panpriocessism but not panpsychism)"

The gain would be that "consciousness" and its content becomes something that needs interpretation, or are always ontic, instead of being open for the claim that it could somehow reach the ontological. Or that it could be reduced to something ontological. Our psychology becomes Kantian, in that it will never reach the thing-in-itself. And it is by necessity, since the only way to reflect upon our psychology would be to make it conscious. (It would also be less metaphysically speculative to talk about different states of consciousness. Just as a drug can make you temporarily blind, or skewer your vision, they can blind your other senses, that of consciousness for example.

Thus it frees the "psyche" in panpsychism" to mean something broader. And we could say that the formations of for example crystals are due to its inherent "soul/psyche" instead of just a product of external forces/laws/conditions.

But why I like it is not only for this question, but I like to be able to ask if someone got/are/where conscious just the same way that I could ask if someone see/saw a certain thing. I think we reify consciousness by the way we talk about it. Making it on par with senses rectifies that a bit.

It could be interesting to look at the definitions of those terms you end with, to maybe reveal what you include in "psyche" to make you refute the idea of panpsychism. (would Hegel be a panpsychist?)

/Joakim

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Alexander Bard

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Aug 8, 2017, 8:07:49 AM8/8/17
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No, Hegel would not be a panpsychist.
The German Idealists were often accused of panpsychism but it does not really make sense to apply to their philosophy of the mind's spiritual evolution.
They simply do not deal with such fundamental metaphysics.
The major panpsychists are rather the later 19th century philosophers who could not help going mysticistic in the midst of their endeavours.
Schopenhauer is definitely one of them, William James albeit more playfully also.
Whitehead's take on panpsychism is a different version altogether (as so often with the eminent Whitehead). But I opt for calling it quantum organicism instead.
Materia and mechanics are just too stale words for process philosophy's understanding of the fundamental nature of existence.
Best
Alexander

2017-08-08 13:58 GMT+02:00 Joakim.grundh <joakim...@blixtmail.se>:
"But no, we gain nothing by throwing consciousness into the category of a sense. Those are my ten cents.
Best
Alexander (ready to accept panorganicism or panpriocessism but not panpsychism)"

The gain would be that "consciousness" and its content becomes something that needs interpretation, or are always ontic, instead of being open for the claim that it could somehow reach the ontological. Or that it could be reduced to something ontological. Our psychology becomes Kantian, in that it will never reach the thing-in-itself. And it is by necessity, since the only way to reflect upon our psychology would be to make it conscious. (It would also be less metaphysically speculative to talk about different states of consciousness. Just as a drug can make you temporarily blind, or skewer your vision, they can blind your other senses, that of consciousness for example.

Thus it frees the "psyche" in panpsychism" to mean something broader. And we could say that the formations of for example crystals are due to its inherent "soul/psyche" instead of just a product of external forces/laws/conditions.

But why I like it is not only for this question, but I like to be able to ask if someone got/are/where conscious just the same way that I could ask if someone see/saw a certain thing. I think we reify consciousness by the way we talk about it. Making it on par with senses rectifies that a bit.

It could be interesting to look at the definitions of those terms you end with, to maybe reveal what you include in "psyche" to make you refute the idea of panpsychism. (would Hegel be a panpsychist?)

/Joakim

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Datum: 2017-08-03 18:31

Ämne: {Syntheism} Panpsychism - A spiritual and philosophical challenge

Yes, I agree, Joakim, very good questions indeed.
To begin with, I think that we can safely arrive at the conclusion that neither "psyche" nor "materia" describes the nature of existence adequatly. I have proposed "quantum organics" instead as a more provovative but also productive term., It is very Whiteheadian, needless to say.
But we can conclude that we always return to ONE substance consisting of an enormous number of connections. So I propose radical monism.
But what that one substance is remains mysterious and is still a question for the philosophy of physics to resolve.
And I also still lack an imprtant clarification of the difference between sentience and consciousness.
What is consciousness outside of self-cionsciousness if not merely sentience?
The debate would gain a lot of credibility if we stayed with the concept of sentience until we really have a reason to speak of that Darwinian mutation called consciousness.
But no, we gain nothing by throwing consciousness into the category of a sense. Those are my ten cents.
Best
Alexander (ready to accept panorganicism or panpriocessism but not panpsychism)
2017-08-03 17:18 GMT+02:00 Joakim.grundh <joakim...@blixtmail.se>:
Hello again you caught my interest with this discussion.

I think it would be interesting to ask whether all humans can be said to be conscious? And is there a scale to it, so that one could be said to be MORE or LESS conscious?

Also; have you ever come across the idea of conciousness as a sense, like our sense of smell and sight?

If one work with a concept such as that consciousness does not become something primary for the organism but is rather on par with the senses. One could also join this idea to ideas about different kind of conciousness stemming from different bodily centers, the triple centers of the brain, the hearth and the gut for instance. So that we term concicousness an aggregate of internal relations in a organism.

It seem that we should define our terms in a way that leaves the question of panpsychism open. If an amoeba can navigate a maze to find its sustenance, should we not grant it consciousness? It has a need, something that fills that need, and act to get that something that fills its needs.
Do we not make unreasonable or antropocentric claims on consciousness if we definie it as something that needs complexity, multiple cells etc? And by doing that only come to a semanatical refutation of panpsychism, or more specific the thruth of "concioussness" and "panpsychism" in combination.

/Joakim

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Turiyo

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Aug 8, 2017, 12:39:23 PM8/8/17
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Dear friends,

what an interesting conversation.
I see firstly - i dont have that background in philosophical studies / literature as you have - still i like to join the conversation.
Gurdjieff used to say that in order to "work" on self-remembering - the first thing that needs to be clarified is the language, the term "self-remembering" in the work of gurdjieff.

Considering our terms "consciousness" or "mind" that is definetly needed.
I actually have no idea why those words where picked. It feels like a try to frame a observation.

If i rip that frame - i dont know what mind or consciousness are supposed to mean.
If i put a certain experience, sensation, view, stance, into these words i can use them.

I for myself just see that i am able to observe this body. It does not mather in what condition i am.
Eyes closed, holotropic state, eyes opened, touching, not touching, moving, seemingly not moving.
When i observe the ability to "choose" my reaction to a situation - that is something that seems more prevalent in us humans although there are "animals" who
are also able to do that - just not that sophisticated yet. Still this is no prove for consciousness and seemingly also no real proof for a mind.

///

Remembering the state observation Ken did using an eeg - he and other people used to practice meditation are able
to alter the brain frequencies to a seemingly dead person - but very alive. ( i dont know how much scientific value these test really have).
According to these studies - awareness, consciousness seems to be a function of the brain.

Comparing it to studies Stanislav Grof did, also relating to Sheldrakes Morphogenetic Fields, there seems to be something
that is beyond the one body - connecting all bodys or parts of existence - which goes against the findings ken is hinting to.
In Stans studies he describes participants being able to describe phenomena that where not related to the person or the body at all,
like new languanges, understanding of rites of other cultures etcpp. - which lead to a deep healing - not having a corellation to the persons biography.

///

I like to use the word being since it is more simple.
To be conscious is something i am able to open up to.
Being is - as for my understanding - a word which doesnt really say anything.
It just is.

Panpsychism is therefore - same as mind or consciousness far to much a something related to the head, to the mind, to a capability to do or act.
Whereas quantum organicism would guide in a direction like the word being (for me). The only thing that i dont find fitting is the word quantum.
Since i believe there might emerge new findings - and then again the word will change in that new one. organicism is closely related to nature which i find fitting.
If we need to find a "label" for that - it would need to be a word that is more related to non-conceptual experience with it. A word that doesn't really explain a thing.

But as i said in the beginning. I am new to this kind of discussion but still like to add my perspective.
I am really interested in your replies - and am eager to learn from you guys!

love and respect
turiyo / gjorgi stojanov



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Jonatan Bäckelie

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Aug 9, 2017, 6:10:07 PM8/9/17
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Dear all in this very intriguing discussion!

I’ve been following what has been said over the last few weeks with interest, although it is quite possible that I’ve overlooked some thoughts that has gone into it thus far. Having read an article today about the consciousness of octopuses (this particular animal being interesting to scientists in relevant fields because it comes from such a different part of the evolutionary spectrum that humans) I felt it about time to contribute my five cents.

 

In his book Neuropolitics contemporary political philosopher William E Connolly draws on Nobel Prize winner Ilya Prigogine’s findings about the “brain-body-network” and (as usual) connects it to his Whiteheadean/Deleuzean outlook on things. One of the points he makes in the book is about the “hi-jacking” of our sense of mind/consciousness in terms of being overpowered by bacteria; anyone who has ever had a bad cold or the flu knows how seriously impeded our cognitive skills and thinking typically are by this. At the same time, bacteria is not counted as “part of the body”, which for instance cells are, although there are roughly 10 times the amount of bacteria in/around/on the body than there are cells. Of course, bacteria cares little about the boundaries we set up via language, such as “this molecule belongs to the body of Jonatan, whilst this molecule is deemed ‘outside’ of it”.

 

Another thing is a brilliant experiment I heard talked about in Josef Gustafsson’s podcast The Catacombic Machine (can’t recall who was talking about it). The experiment was that mold in a petri dish was attacked by some foreign agent being introduced into the dish with 30 minute intervals. Each time, the mold would respond with a protective stance. After the fourth time however, when 30 minutes had passed, the mold went into its defensive stance in preparation for the upcoming “attack”. The experiment was furthered by introducing new mold (previously unattacked) to the petri dish. After 2 intervalls, the new mold had somehow been “taught” to respond with a protective stance. There was some kind of information transfer. The conclusion of the experiment was that this was suggestive of subjectivity manifesting, albeit on a rudimentary level. In other words; subjectivity is everywhere, from small “unevolved” entities, to us vastly more complex humans.

 

These serve to exemplify why I find subjectivity a more productive word to operate from than the mysterious “mind” or consciousness, or for that matter “sentience” which to me indicates (and here I could admittedly be off) merely the possibility to react to sensations. Subjectivity, in contrast can be seen as sentience coupled with a productive drive (in the Deleuzean sense); desire or aspirations that can unfold and transfer onto new “plateaus”.

 

However, subjectivity in the sense I apply is an on-going emergence, in contrast to consciousness which is – as many of you have noted – emergent, but it seems that it is an emergence that has somehow “stopped” its own emergence. That is my beef with the idea of consciousness; the common place understanding of it as a fixed evolutionary trait: once you have it – it stays in place and remains roughly the same. Subjectivity, on the other hand, is less fixed, and is an on-going emergent phenomenon, which can interact with surrounding subjectivities. The way I read Deleuze “the schizo out for a walk” is a manifestation of not one united mind, but different subjective drives, forcefields, inclinations that pull us in different directions at once.

 

Bacteria coursing through (one of) our subjectivy steam(s) exemplify this. How subjectivity is radically altered in the encounter with other things that takes over our system. A day of excessive coffee intake for me also places my focus on another node in (what Prigogine and Connolly calls) the “brain-body-network”. It may return to a different state, or things that happened in the altered state may change “me” long-term. Some remainders of information, sensations of chock to the system, can reassemble some parts of what I typically choose to view (or is ideologically inclined to view) as my “regular” subjectivity.

 

Maybe this distinction makes little sense to some of you, but subjectivity – subjugations within a larger system – can perhaps be a way out of tricking ourselves into thinking that subjectivity exists mainly or only on the plane where we are able to send emails to one another on this mailing list. Instead, subjectivities can be seen as overlapping, and even acknowledge that systems that are in some ways “lesser” like bacteria, can hijack the whole advanced spaceship that we call the human body.

 

Charles Taylor uses the term “the porous self” to talk about how people in the olden days believed about spirits and demons and whatnots were able to enter the human body and rearrange things horribly. With the advent of the individual, we started viewing the self as impregnable, at the cost of mental illness and other ills of the “mind” was attributed to oneself, and pose challenges that the individual owe it to herself to conquer (the Enlightenment was nothing if not rooting for conquering stuff). Perhaps it’s time to re-frame “the porous self” as an indication of how the brittle human perception/sentience is so easily overcome by too much coffee or too much man-cold.

 

This leads me to my final point; that of panpsychism itself. Based on the train-of-thought above, it seems more viable to speak of multiple sites of subjectivity interacting or counteracting – in any case overlapping with – one another. We are, in our moment of flu, somehow aware of the impact of a number of subjectivities that rage within us momentarily. So instead of seeing consciousness as a solid entity that is exposed to things and then “return to normal”, “there once we’ve acquired it through evolution” subjectivities keep on interacting, emerging, with the distinction from sentience that it can drive us in catastrophic directions for what is most often perceived as our “primary” subjectiveness. Somewhich which (although I’m not versed enough in psychoanalysis) Freud calls “the death drive”. But the death drive is not really strange when adopting a view that not everyone in the machinery of the spaceship has gotten behind the idea that there is one psyche, mind or consciousness that should ultimately be protected. Instead, in a human body that is replete with differing drives, it is less strange that subjectivities imprinted upon different levels of our brain-body-network do not align. So, panpsychism? No. Overlapping, competing and sometimes co-operating subjectivities; some of which we can perceive, overview or perhaps even master (with medicine, meditation, art or whatnot). But of course, if bacteria can assemble without understanding what the Jonatan-host is experiencing, then it follows that our subjectivities could also (logically) be “lesser” than more grand force-fields (like how we are immersed in a specific ecological context). If ecosystems are also subjective in some matter of the word, that is perhaps as close to panpsychism we’ll ever come. But that’s not for us to know or ever experience, much like the bacteria will never know what it’s like to perform a killer song in front of a thousand people. Did I just end up in the conclusion; panpsychism – who cares?

 

Love and respect

/Jonatan


On Thu, Aug 3, 2017 at 6:31 PM, Alexander Bard <bardi...@gmail.com> wrote:
Yes, I agree, Joakim, very good questions indeed.
To begin with, I think that we can safely arrive at the conclusion that neither "psyche" nor "materia" describes the nature of existence adequatly. I have proposed "quantum organics" instead as a more provovative but also productive term., It is very Whiteheadian, needless to say.
But we can conclude that we always return to ONE substance consisting of an enormous number of connections. So I propose radical monism.
But what that one substance is remains mysterious and is still a question for the philosophy of physics to resolve.
And I also still lack an imprtant clarification of the difference between sentience and consciousness.
What is consciousness outside of self-cionsciousness if not merely sentience?
The debate would gain a lot of credibility if we stayed with the concept of sentience until we really have a reason to speak of that Darwinian mutation called consciousness.
But no, we gain nothing by throwing consciousness into the category of a sense. Those are my ten cents.
Best
Alexander (ready to accept panorganicism or panpriocessism but not panpsychism)
2017-08-03 17:18 GMT+02:00 Joakim.grundh <joakim...@blixtmail.se>:
Hello again you caught my interest with this discussion.

I think it would be interesting to ask whether all humans can be said to be conscious? And is there a scale to it, so that one could be said to be MORE or LESS conscious?

Also; have you ever come across the idea of conciousness as a sense, like our sense of smell and sight?

If one work with a concept such as that consciousness does not become something primary for the organism but is rather on par with the senses. One could also join this idea to ideas about different kind of conciousness stemming from different bodily centers, the triple centers of the brain, the hearth and the gut for instance. So that we term concicousness an aggregate of internal relations in a organism.

It seem that we should define our terms in a way that leaves the question of panpsychism open. If an amoeba can navigate a maze to find its sustenance, should we not grant it consciousness? It has a need, something that fills that need, and act to get that something that fills its needs.
Do we not make unreasonable or antropocentric claims on consciousness if we definie it as something that needs complexity, multiple cells etc? And by doing that only come to a semanatical refutation of panpsychism, or more specific the thruth of "concioussness" and "panpsychism" in combination.

/Joakim

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Alexander Bard

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Aug 11, 2017, 12:18:31 PM8/11/17
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Billliant posting, dear Jonatan!

I agree. So if we speak of "subjectivities" in this manner they are not everywhere but they are abundant. We must therefore skip the pan prefix. But we must understand that loads of networks build on these Deleuzian subjectivites (or Nietzschean microwills if you like) and it is merely increasing complexity that makes one network different from the next with the human brain-bdy network the most advanced so far. I could definitely work with and build from this model. Towards some form of panorganicism with subjectivities as emergenes within.

Best
Alexander

fannynorlin

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Aug 12, 2017, 7:37:44 AM8/12/17
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Brent- I find the idea of “informational matrix 'all the way down' which is constituted differently at different orders of magnitude, giving way to complex emergence as we scale up “ really interesting and think that it is this “informational matrix” that we need to unpack and build the ethics behind metamodern politics on. 


In the spiritual world my feeling is that they cling to panpsychism since it gives a logic behind order-creating things like karma, that there is something all-seeing that will assure negative consequences if we do not behave “good”. But if we are to remove this belief we still need to replace it with a better “belief” that can help us create some kind of illusion of order in the “real” chaos of the world. So my question is what is this order? Reading previous threads my take would be that the answer is interactive ethics. But I am wondering, since we can only perceive the world through our consciousness which consists of eternal snapshots of the worlds’ mobilism, is it possible for us to set these ethics outside a frame? If not, what is this frame? 


Could it be be the patterns of emergence that are “valid” in this universe? For ex the pattern that all things strive towards being part of a better non-zero sum games, not because they are necessarily conscious, more that it is a like a programmed code of this universe. A code that itself has emerged through evolution, since a better non-zero-sum game is more energy efficient = more capable of surviving. So if something is a better non-zero sum game it’s good, if not it’s bad. And of course this will depend on what level of abstraction you are looking at the game/system from.


What are your ideas of the informational matrix or “causations upward/downward”? Or do you even agree that they are relevant to define?


Best,

Fanny 


Regards, 

Brent

Great presentation <3


Regards, 

Brent

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Stéphane Gibon-Clément

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Aug 12, 2017, 4:58:58 PM8/12/17
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Dear fellow Syntheists,

Thank you for such an interesting conversation to follow and all the content rich links !

The focus on non zero sum games seems promising indeed. Isn't this energy saving principle even already built into chemistry, with the covalent bonds ?

Regarding the different levels of subjectivities, wouldn't it incline more towards phase transition than emergence ?

For the difference sentience vs self-consciousness, couldn't we argue that a simple organism has already a sense of self, as in the example of the amoeba doing chemiotrophy ? In the sens that, the amoeba biological system has to differentiate what chemicals comes from inside vs from outside itself. For sentience to "make any sense at all" doesn't it presupposes a modicum of self consciousness, blurring the line between sentience and consciousness even more ?
Isn't this self vs world separation more related to the difference between biology and chemistry than biology and consciousness?

This talk on the neurological basis of consciousness was also a good watch (I think Anil Seth's name was mentioned in the metamordenism post):
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xRel1JKOEbI

One of the major points of the talk is how the brain uses its prior information as well as the current information uptake from the senses to create a perceptive mix, much like in Bayesian statistics.
This predictive capacity of the brain (my own thoughts on it now) could maybe hijack natural selection via a creation of a repertoire of multiple behaviors (or subjectivities as mentioned above) and be combined with a high behavioral plasticity. Could it be that consciousness has emerged as a way to deal with this massive amount of subjectivities, choosing the right one fitting the right conditions ?
What are the characteristics of conscious organisms like humans and dolphins that truly differentiate them from non-conscious biological organisms ?

Best,
Stéphane

Alexander Bard

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Aug 13, 2017, 6:03:11 AM8/13/17
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If I can chip in, as a strong anti-Platonist, anything that is "pre-programmed" smacks of too much Artistotle to me.
Real emergences are rather not programmed at all but contain enough of chance and indeterminism so that they qualify as "novelties" that "just happen to occur" (think the history of physics-chemistry-biology where biology was not part of the big bang code). In a presentist and not eternalist universe.
Whatever happens that seems to always happen under similar cirumstances and also in reverse order is not an emergence at all but rather just a phase transition (think steam-water-ice where steam is part of the ice code et cetera).
So I am a strong emergentist (like Heraclitus as opposed to Plato and Aristotle) which makes my values ethical (smart versus stupid) as opposed to moralistic (good versus evil) in the vein of Nietzsche and Heidegger rather than Descartes and Kant. The defense of the open and contingent universe. Not the law-bound.
So what can be great ethics then in the network age? Well, network ethics, or interactive ethics. Which must then indeed be open and ever-changing. Which is why I'm a Zoroastrian of course.
My only problem with the enormous potential of a phenomenon like block chains is then the STUPIDITY and not the evil of such systems. For example in that block chains so far do not allow for any mistakes and therefore any risks to be taken. And great ethics in the long run allow for huge amounts of Darwinian evolution, memetics, genetics, and trial and error. THAT is the problem we must historically solve. Laws are too clumsy, so how do we construct rules that change with the time, with the evolution?
So maybe I'm meta-ethical here, Fanny. But in response to your great posting, I would rather say that a paradigm of "technometamodernism" should focus on how to build intelligent block chains that allow for maximum amounts of evolutionary experimentation. Otherwise, we will all soon start to look like Chinese Communists.
No, let's build systems that beat Chinese Communism by just embracing evolution and experimentation better. Let's be Guangzhou rather than Beijing here. Silicon Valley rather than Washington etc.
Love and best intentions
Alexander

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Alexander Bard

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Aug 13, 2017, 6:27:17 AM8/13/17
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Small small detail: Why not go with Bäckeliés "subjectivity" here instead of the fancier "self-consciousness"?
"Subjectivity" is required for an organic system to differentiate between "outside" and "inside" phenomena. But not the far more complex "self-cosciousness".
I therefore really like working from a panorganicism that involves subjectivity. And skip too many human associations.
And this provides a relationalism that is foundational rather than Wendt's quantum decision theory.
Because the great thing with Wendt is that decision making CAN be quantum rather than MUST be quantum. He opens the door to a new understanding but we can also pick and choose from his argumentation.
And it is then the area between quantum decision theory and Whiteheadian relationalism that harbours the true goldmine lies in understanding consciousness. I see books coming here.
Best
Alexander

Joakim.grundh

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Aug 14, 2017, 8:36:42 AM8/14/17
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Interesting thoughts Stéphane. I agree a lot with your text. But I see it as an informational problem also, to interact an inside need to represent an outside, and then arrange itself in accords with the outside to get the "need" fulfillment. It is hard to see "knowledge" taking place otherwise, unless we state some kind of platonic ideal place where we can know something without it being re-presented in us, or it being part of us.

For something to know something else it seems that we need some kind of dublication of the object of knowledge in the subject that knows. Now does it matter if that is a mechanical organizing, like a computers binary states, or a more complex language or biochemical instead of mechanical?

I feel like most of us here that discuss seems to agree that consciousness holds too much connotations. And is a bit shady and unclear, with supranatural connotations. But it is not clear if we should throw out the terms of consciousness, or mental, in favor for other concepts, or if we should critizice the connotations in our definition.
Should we even alow ourself to talk about "non-conscious biological organisms"? What would that be? The mold that grows towards the damp instead of the dry could be said to be conscious of humidity right?

It is like we deny the supermaterial status of the mind and consciousness but at the same time talk as if there were needed something supermaterial for something to be conscious OF something. If the one substance we assumes in a monism are working to further a process by forms of selection is that not all that is needed to talk about consciousness, and rather focus on scopes and ranges of concsiousness that things have, when we differentiate.

A fully automated respons like pulling the hand from a hot stove could be said to be done by the hand, itself being conscious of the heat. Breaking our consciousness into an aggregate of processes, instead of claiming its primacy as "captain of the ship".

Sincerely
Joakim



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Alexander Bard

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Aug 14, 2017, 6:09:29 PM8/14/17
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Dear Joakim, Stephane et al

I did actually do a rather radical departure from usual consciousness studies in the "Syntheism" book with Jan Söderqvist, where we elaborated on the idea that consciousness can also be viewed as a failure of something else. In the sense that The Universe does not need a consciousness (one could even say that it is too perfect to have a simple consciousness) and neither do we as humans as long as we are completely co-dependent of our mother's bodies. So if consciousness is viewed as a failure of something it is not suddenly something miraculously emergent but rather a last desperate attempt at survival for species that otherwise would wither and die during Darwinian evolution. After all, all hominids less conscious than homo sapiens became extinct. And once consciousness is an energy-consuming survival mechanism for some rare species, and this only, then why not just add a sense of self to the mix as it takes little extra energy and off we go? For what is a self if not merely the failure of completing a world view construction?

Best
Alexander

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Alexander Bard

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Aug 15, 2017, 3:09:53 AM8/15/17
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Wait, wait, wait, did you just write "just information"???
Because this is where it gets really really really interesting, dear Brett & Co.
Information does not have force, information does not change in itself, information does not in itself establish and maintain constantly changing relations.
Reality apparently does all of those things though. So the innermost core of reality is definitely not "just information". Which explains why I strongly object to Max Tegmark's "A Mathematical Universe" as nothing but just another dead Platonist tombstone. Philosophically extremely naive.
We must do much better.
Superstrings are so far the possibly best physical theory on the innermost building blocks of reality. Especially when combined with proper emergentism. And the Planck length is the real mystery as a unit. As the point where "potential things" and "actual things" differ.
But we are also thinking the world fundamentally wrong when thinking of the world as consisting of"eternalised objects". Because change and relationalism is more primary - relation predates relata in a Whiteheadian universe -  than the Kantian world of phenomena. Both the field and the intensity are primary to the combined field of intensity that we may perceive as a phenomenon in our post-Kantian phenomenology.
I want to get at this. In this group. With the people here.
So what is the best metaphor for the most minor building blocks of reality? In quantum physics, anything below the Planck length is nothing but "pure chaos". But what the fuck is that then?
What is "information" as opposed to "force", "relation" and "change"?
It sure isn't "psyche" though, right?
Best
Alexander

2017-08-15 4:24 GMT+02:00 Brent Cooper <brent...@gmail.com>:
Hi Fanny,

I do think its worth defining, thanks for asking. I can't recall what the best source is, but I know I've come across it in mainstream quantum physics-- that when you get down to the deepest level, there is no 'matter' per se, its just information. 

This makes sense to me in terms of metaphysics as 'first principles' (of reality, not ethics in this case), which is based on geometry. It's difficult for us to picture "information" at the quantum level, if we are thinking of data or formulae, but everything is ultimately based on geometry, and geometry is present across all scales/ levels. In a way, this could refer to real Platonic forms. The problem of course is its not obvious how our complex social reality (including our perception of reality) emerges from this base truth... and not because we can't understand it, but because there are countless layers of emergence. Layer upon layer, we are separated by oceans of information. 

This geometry, especially if we talk about 'sacred geometry,' could be a sort of abstract 'intelligence' that qualifies as panpsychism (and perhaps the only version, if we are strict). Sacred geometry refers to a subset of geometry that is simple, elegant, harmonious, and in particular incorporates phi (1.618...). No new age dogma is necessary to indulge sacred geometry, but I am just using it to make a point about geometry and information. And to be clear, it is geometry alone that allows us to make true statements about 'alignment', as opposed to feelings or self-delusion, or astrological coincidences. It is particularly interesting how geometry is reflected across different scales.. from the subatomic, through humans, to the solar system level, and beyond. 

I would compare the different levels of analysis to having different rules (although not different laws of physics). The "game of life" is the archetypal example to simulate how life emerged from such an informational matrix. We can see how when we get to the social level, it is much more complex, but we still make decisions in matrices nonetheless.

Bringing it back to the quantum brain hypothesis... suppose that the more complex a form of life, the more it can interact and feedback into this geometric panpsychism. And our decisions, whether they be free choices, or some higher (and rarer) act of the will, such as an abstract goal or intention, are made in some sort of informational matrix too. If the brain is a quantum computer, it must be true that our self-observation would have similar effects to any quantum experiments. 

We were talking about ethics in another thread, and I'm for some kind of 'moral absolutism' based on a hypothetical ideal abstract frame of reference. And to be sure, we should assume nested frames of reference. So, we could abstract out 2, 3, 4, 5,.. frames and improve our moral standard.. but also acknowledge that it goes deeper than we can reach. Moral enlightenment, like intellectual, demands of us that we keep striving. 


Regards, 

Brent

Joakim.grundh

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Aug 15, 2017, 9:55:17 AM8/15/17
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Can information be information without the subjective relationship to "the facts"? I agree with Alexander here. To reduce our prima substance to information really doesn't do anything.

But I would also like to ask the question whether or not we should accept a atomism, or that the primary building blocks would be discrete. That we see "physical" existence is only an ontic relata qua our percieving. Just as an ocean is made of drops, and that the surface is not something in itself, but rather interchangeable parts making up a surface, we could stipulate the physical as something equally "non-identic" taken to itself.

Another way to express it would be to say that we only perceive the edges of being by its interaction with the other.

So when I theorize I do not focus on the parts, but rather the whole. This comes from a couple of stipulations I make in relation to monism. I hold it for true, but think I am a bit more radical in my monism than you Alexander. This since I do not assume the reality of time or space.

My reason is this. If we hold monism for true, then it is not in the particle, or the "smallest building block" that is relevant. It is what it is, and since it is also all that is, we should do as the traditions of religion and put a ban on the depiction of this "all" since we would only reduce it, rather than capture its essence.

What is interesting instead is how this single substance/matter/building block can assume the multitude of differences that we see. So that is why I reverse the order of questioning. Instead of asking, what do I see and what is it. I rather ask, how can I see, and what are the conditions of this percieving. And then you see a necessity of structure of the One. This is in line with the "know thy self" of Apollo or the Kantian reversal starting in the subject and by elimination trying to reach the "outside" by reducing all "internal" from the relation of subject/object.

If we look at time there really is no need for time. And if we look at space, there is no Euklidian space to be seen, other than in ideal observation (the a priori constructable). So I think that pattern, or processes, are of more importance than "the smallest part".

Why do you think we need a smallest part Alexander? How does it help us to find it?


Best regards
Joakim


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Datum: 2017-08-15 09:09
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Joakim.grundh

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Aug 15, 2017, 10:05:09 AM8/15/17
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Just another input here:



"But we are also thinking the world fundamentally wrong when thinking of the world as consisting of"eternalised objects"."

Is this not what is seen in the, perceived, dichotomy of Parmenides and Herakleitos?

Parmenides with his "nothing can change" starts in the mind and in identities. While Herakleitos start in "nature" and see nothing but changes.
So a synthesis gives that we always implore eternalised objects/identities (our mind) on a non-identical process.
Can we think without these eternal identities? Is this not something we found out about the architectonic of our perceptions?



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Alexander Bard

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Aug 15, 2017, 11:32:51 AM8/15/17
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Oh, I totally AGREE with you here, dear Joakim!
I'm a radical Whiteheadian. A radical realtionalist. And social relationalist too. Perhaps Wendt's beloved quantum matrixes are just relationalistic rather than classically rationalistic?
Which is precisely why holism, monism, relationalism, presentism and process philosophy are just different aspects of one metaphysics.
One universe (the only thing that is one is The Universe itself, everything else is by nature "split" or "relational", meaning the only unity is the one found on the surface but not inside The Universe; which ironically allows for at least two time dimensions, hypetime on the outside and relative "Einsteinian time" on the inside). But within that One Universe realised at each and every Momentum of its History a massive multiplicity of fields of intensities rather than any obejcts. And the phenomena we perceive are nothing but our eternaliisation of these ever-changing fields. Discretion is then nothing but the eternalisation of difference.
But it is precisely at the Planck length's edge and the difference there in phenomenal chaos and phenomenal order that we find a smallest possible differentiation for all perception. And what exactly that consists of is deeply mysterious. We can only begin to grasp "pure relations" and "pure chaos" above and below the Planck length. Remains to be seen where we arrive.
Best
Alexander

2017-08-15 15:55 GMT+02:00 Joakim.grundh <joakim...@blixtmail.se>:

Can information be information without the subjective relationship to "the facts"? I agree with Alexander here. To reduce our prima substance to information really doesn't do anything.

But I would also like to ask the question whether or not we should accept a atomism, or that the primary building blocks would be discrete. That we see "physical" existence is only an ontic relata qua our percieving. Just as an ocean is made of drops, and that the surface is not something in itself, but rather interchangeable parts making up a surface, we could stipulate the physical as something equally "non-identic" taken to itself.

Another way to express it would be to say that we only perceive the edges of being by its interaction with the other.

So when I theorize I do not focus on the parts, but rather the whole. This comes from a couple of stipulations I make in relation to monism. I hold it for true, but think I am a bit more radical in my monism than you Alexander. This since I do not assume the reality of time or space.

My reason is this. If we hold monism for true, then it is not in the particle, or the "smallest building block" that is relevant. It is what it is, and since it is also all that is, we should do as the traditions of religion and put a ban on the depiction of this "all" since we would only reduce it, rather than capture its essence.

What is interesting instead is how this single substance/matter/building block can assume the multitude of differences that we see. So that is why I reverse the order of questioning. Instead of asking, what do I see and what is it. I rather ask, how can I see, and what are the conditions of this percieving. And then you see a necessity of structure of the One. This is in line with the "know thy self" of Apollo or the Kantian reversal starting in the subject and by elimination trying to reach the "outside" by reducing all "internal" from the relation of subject/object.

If we look at time there really is no need for time. And if we look at space, there is no Euklidian space to be seen, other than in ideal observation (the a priori constructable). So I think that pattern, or processes, are of more importance than "the smallest part".

Why do you think we need a smallest part Alexander? How does it help us to find it?


Best regards
Joakim


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fannynorlin

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Aug 16, 2017, 2:51:48 AM8/16/17
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Thanks Alexander, I agree with you on your view of emergence and great points about creating ethics that themselves mirror evolution. Something I still can’t get my head around: My understanding is that emergence per definition leads to greater complexity and a better non-zero sum game. And that even if we can’t “program” for emergence, since they just happen (like you say the best we can do is “program” an allowance for mistakes), can’t we still recognise that once something has emerged, if it survives, it will be smarter than the what it emerged from? 

If this holds true does that not mean that we are evolving towards better non-zero sum games (even it the only way to “engineer” this development is to give room for random emergence)?

Alexander Bard

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Aug 16, 2017, 7:25:56 AM8/16/17
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Geometry is nothing but relations. There is consequently no "program" to geometry. All assumed "geometric laws" are totally tautological.
Which is why Söderqvist and I argue in our next  book that The Universe is geometrical rather than mathematical. Mathematics has allowed for example the number 0 and infinity to sneek in. But none of them exist ontically. There are however no such sneek-ins in the world of geometry.
But geometry does not explain force and change. And while it is correct that there is no ultimate substance on the micro-level and that even particles are miniscule with enormous spaces in between them, those spaces in between (while consisting of space and time to begin with) are filled with incredibly strong forces. These forces consequently have as much ontic and original quality as any assumed "substance". Substance is simply forces and relations and thereby constantly changing. Which geometry does not explain. Time/change remains the true mystery.
The correct terminology for this is, Sdöerqvist and I believe, network dynamics.
Which is why our chapter that responds to my good old friend Max Tegmark's "The Mathematical Universe" (yes, we did attend the Stockholm School of Economics together in the 1980s) is a chapter called "Our Network-Dynamical Universe". This is our take on Whiteaheadianism versus Platonism (where Tegmark is the last Platonist).
Still, we have not yet solved what happens around the Planck length. Which is both a philosophical and physical question. Especially as it must also be defined along the time axis. As Tegmark and the other physicists are happy to admit.
Best
Alexander

2017-08-15 19:46 GMT+02:00 Brent Cooper <brent...@gmail.com>:
Indeed, I probably misspoke a bit, saying 'just information.' Truly, I don't know what's down there, as I'm by no means a physicist.. but there is a lot to be said for the way reality is 'coded' or can be reduced to information if it is represented most abstractly. Of course there is matter, and that matter and energy are conversions of each other, but the fact that a rock is not as "solid" as we perceive it to be (and in fact it is in a way "empty" and permeable), says more about its informational composition than it does about matter, methinks. 

Remember, in the origins of the universe there was only hydrogen and helium, and so long before life emerged, elements themselves had to "emerge" from simpler building blocks. I think Geometry (yes, capital G) is a good example because you can also start from basic shapes (circles, triangles, squares) and eventually build macro structures that subtle hide more complex forms of geometry (most obvious in phyllotaxis, less obvious in humans, but its there).

The solar system itself is a remarkable example of sacred geometry. No mere coincidence, but something programmed into gravity itself perhaps. 

I think "information" can encapsulate force, relation, change, etc.. which is why I propose geometry itself is the best metaphor. Am I being too simplistic? Lest we forget the prehistorical origins of philosophy itself in geometry. 

Regards, 

Brent


Regards, 

Brent

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Alexander Bard

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Aug 16, 2017, 7:32:56 AM8/16/17
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Point taken, dear Fanny, but I would disagree with the assumption "smarter". Higher complexity can mean just higher complexity.
It can even be argued that the first thing that happens after an emergence of higher complexity is increased chaos.
Only later can enough stability arrive within a system to allow for higher intelligence within that system to develop.
Paradigm shifts in history are perfect examples. First comes chaos, only later comes order within that chaos, enabling analytical intelligence. And the more complex the system, the longer the chaotic period must be expected to remain. Which is why humans and elephants need to nurture our capable children way longer than other animals. Chaos is an initial cost for complexity.
Also there is really no connection between emergence and complexity per se. A simplification can also be viewed as en emergence in hindsight.
Written and then printed language simplified systems, which then allowed those systems to grow rapidly because of simplification.
We then for example killed thousands and thousands of languages and dialects in the process. But it was probably worth it. At least for us who survived the transition. ;-)
Best
Alexander

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Daniel Görtz

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Aug 16, 2017, 12:11:48 PM8/16/17
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Wow... Geometrical. This is very nice Alejandro. Looking forward to the new tome. Maybe on a conference next year we could all present the ideas of one another. Me and two others could pehaps divide up your opus and present it. I would love to talk about Syntheism or ontology.

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竜虎風森

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Aug 16, 2017, 5:43:06 PM8/16/17
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Seconded again.

竜虎風森

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Aug 22, 2017, 10:48:14 PM8/22/17
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Alex,

Network dynamics make much for sense than a Mathematical Universe.  Mathematicians might find themselves in an epoch where they cling to old beliefs like monotheists do.

---Keric

Alexander Bard

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Aug 23, 2017, 3:10:00 AM8/23/17
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Well, mathematics is the ultimate ontology WITHOUT ontics.
But it also stopped representing reality and went off on its own ages ago. While it still works as the ultimate measuring tool of whatever we phenomenally perceive.
But it is not reality and the simple idea that it could be is ridiculous, at best.
Because mathematics is nothing but the frozen and dead perception of something else entirely.
So I go for network dynamics as it implies two things mathematics misses: Constant change within a world of forces, fields and relations.
Relations producing relata as their effects. Radical relationalism within a monist universe. Whitehead and Deleuze agree. As do contemporaries like Manuel Delanda too.
And organic it may be, but without any requirement for "psyche" as category.
Best
Alexander
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