So by "we" do you mean panpsychists? — Daemon
But the sharp and personal sense of the immediate is also involved in the modeling of the subpersonal, the pre-reflective, the unconscious and the automatic; in other words, the general that is placed as outside of the situated awareness of the personal is itself a product of that situated awareness. — Joshs
Reduction normally involves explaining one thing completely in terms of things other than it. — bert1
Stability of form and structure is an illusion. — Harry Hindu
If reductionism is faulty then how is it that we understand the things we have invented as products of smaller parts? — Harry Hindu
Energy and matter would be different substances and forms. — Harry Hindu
Let the dictionary be your friend: "[Reductionism is] the practice of analysing and describing a complex phenomenon in terms of its simple or fundamental constituents, especially when this is said to provide a sufficient explanation." — apokrisis
I see, and that's what you're asserting of panpsychists, that panpsychists think consciousness is a complex phenomenon, fully explained in terms of fundamental constituents, which panpsychists assert are themselves also conscious. Is that right? — bert1
The simple answer is that you don't seem to understand the terms in the usual way. — apokrisis
I see, and that's what you're asserting of panpsychists, that panpsychists think consciousness is a complex phenomenon, fully explained in terms of fundamental constituents, which panpsychists assert are themselves also conscious. Is that right? — bert1
You introduced the term and said panpsychism was reductionist. I'm just trying to understand what you mean! — bert1
...it's odd to think of panpsychism as a reductionist theory, because it is precisely difficulties reducing consciousness to processes, functions, information, whatever, which motivates some panpsychists. — bert1
Panpsychism covers a number of views. What most of them have in common is perhaps that consciousness is present in every system. — bert1
Are you asking what my particular panpsychist view is? — bert1
I'm hung up right now though, on this idea that there necessarily had to be something there (a pre-existing mind) that knew how to assemble this information into self awareness. Unless we posit that all of it somehow knew how to do it, as though each piece is a self existent fractal of the whole. — Watchmaker
Are you answering any time soon? — apokrisis
I see, and that's what you're asserting of panpsychists, that panpsychists think consciousness is a complex phenomenon, fully explained in terms of fundamental constituents, which panpsychists assert are themselves also conscious. Is that right? — bert1
Really? They all claim consciousness is a universal property of systems, not a universal property of matter? — apokrisis
Was this the version of panpsychism that I was responding to in the OP? — apokrisis
Or the more usual dictionary definition? — apokrisis
I gave you the dictionary definitions. They fit what I was saying. If you think different, show me how. — apokrisis
That the substance that the universe is composed of is essentially consciousness?
— Watchmaker
That's what I think, yes. Not all panpsychists think that though. — bert1
.
I think the notion that apokrisis and I take issue with, in different ways, is the depiction of consciousness as a substance or property. What makes this problematic is that it is the tendency to reduce phenomena to physical substance that led to the hard problem to
begin with. If all you have is hammer , then everything looks like a nail, and if your only metaphysics is monistic naturalism, then everything looks like a substance.
But consciousness is neither an object, a substance or a property, but a relational activity. — Joshs
But consciousness is neither an object, a substance or a property, but a relational activity. — Joshs
Husserl thinks that all traditional philosophy, including Descartes and Kant, had treated consciousness as something having a completely natural being, a mere part of nature, and a dependent or epiphenomenal part at that. Even Kant had misunderstood transcendental psychology as a psychology. Husserl regards naturalism both as the dominant theoretical outlook of his age and also as deeply embedded in our ordinary assumptions about the world surrounding us. In other words, our pre-theoretical engagement with the world has an inbuilt bias towards naive naturalism. This is fine in our ordinary practices in the world, but when naturalism is elevated into an allencompassing theoretical outlook, it actually becomes far removed from the natural attitude and in fact grossly distorts it. Husserl’s critique of naturalism is that it is a distorted conception of the fruits of scientific method which in itself is not inextricably wedded to a naturalist construal. — Dermot Moran, Routledge Intro to Phenomenology, p142
Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sense—this would be a subjective idealism, itself a consequence of a certain naturalising tendency whereby consciousness is cause and the world its effect—but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness. — p144
I have always understood, that the naturalist view, is that consciousness is an emergent property. — Watchmaker
What the panpsychist argument attempts to do is to depict 'consciouness' in naturalistic terms, as an object or the property of objects. — Wayfarer
Apo, you are behaving very oddly. — bert1
But consciousness is neither an object, a substance or a property, but a relational activity. — Joshs
It is not as if - even for the materialist - consciousness could be regarded as some kind of ultimate simple, when it is plainly the ultimate in terms of its material complexity. — apokrisis
It seems according to you, panpsychists don't mean to reduce consciousness to being another ultimately simple property of matter, like presumably mass and charge. — apokrisis
And you say that panpsychists also can't see how consciousness could reduce to processes, functions, or information. — apokrisis
And somehow "a snail, a molecule, an atom, a field" are all just essentially the same metaphysical category in your eyes - presumably a system (a system that has no process or function) — apokrisis
And you say you want clarification from me.... — apokrisis
You gave a bunch of different contradictory answers to the one question. That's slightly different. — apokrisis
Whilst nevertheless possessing the paradoxical attribute of subjective unity. — Wayfarer
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