To Hoffman, on the other hand, consciousness is fundamental in that the contents of an individual’s consciousness (or the contents of various collectives of “conscious agents”) is literally constitutive of reality or the whole of the universe (as well as everything in it). The argumentdepends upon the idea that enminded beings are self-movers. Generalised . The main difference is that whilst panpsychists think that the physical world is fundamental, idealists think that there is a more fundamental reality underlying the physical world. How can a panpsychist think both that the physical world is fundamental and that consciousness is fundamental? But in any case, the point is moot as a panpsychist need not commit to particles. This difference between panpsychism and Idealism/Nondualism is critical: the former proposes fragmentation as the fundamental reality, while the latter proposes unity, fragmentation being just an illusion arising from dissociative processes. to post comments or “[c]onscious realism, by contrast, offers a scientific theory of the noumenal, viz., a mathematical formulation of conscious agents and their dynamical interactions”. Philosophy 1153 Idealism, Solipsism, and Panpsychism – Chapter 4 Response Panpsychism and solipsism are two philosophical ideas that deal with the question of minds. Both of these explanatory gaps could be removed by postulating basic laws of nature to bridge the gap. And yet we know there is more than one mind: there are at least 7.5 billion of them. Hoffman says that Kant believed that. (In one place, Hoffman does say that he accepts what he sees as one type of panpsychism — the one that’s not, in his eyes, “dualist”.). That’s a fundamental assumption of most.”. There’s also a big difference between the stress on how we gain access to (as it were) reality and the idealist position that it’s all about what goes on in one’s head. To sum up. Again, that’s fine as it stands, but we would still need a constitutive explanation of how consciousness comes into existence from purely physical states of affairs. As Hoffman puts it about one “interpretation” of Kant: “This interpretation of Kant precludes any science of the noumenal, for if we cannot describe the noumenal then we cannot build scientific theories of it.”, Yet Hoffman’s own conscious realism isn’t a scientific theory either. Actually, I prefer idealism to panpsychism, my personal opinion is that reality is analogous to a computer program being computed by consciousness. I hate to say it because the answer is 20th-century philosophical handbook knowledge: the big alternative came with the so called linguistic turn: the step into the world of statements. According to micropsychism, the fundamental conscious subjects are particles, such as electrons and quarks. In fact he uses it (in various places) in order to defend his own position of conscious realism. Hoffman, on the other hand, stresses the fundamentality of consciousness by writing it into the story at the Big Bang (actually, just after). Having said that, I’m less and less sympathetic to reductionist panpsychism as time goes on. Panpsychism is the view that mind or soul is a universal feature of all things; this has been a common view in western philosophy going back to the Presocratics and Plato. The objections he raises are certainly powerful challenges, but there are some very good responses to these kinds of challenges, and these responses have not been conclusively refuted. ), The rest of the Hoffman quote above makes some correct distinctions between panpsychism and conscious realism. It’s still the case that according to Christianity God had a physical body. Christians believe that God became man, and hence that God had a physical body. To repeat. And, if that’s correct, then that puts idealism and anti-realism in radically different places. Bernardo can’t assume without argument that dissociation alone is sufficient to produce a new subject because that would be to assume without argument the truth of his view. The mind versus the heart. Bernardo and I are booked in to debate the Consciousness Live YouTube channel later this summer. panpsychism vs idealism, This difference between panpsychism and Idealism/Nondualism is critical: the former proposes fragmentation as the fundamental reality, while the latter proposes unity, fragmentation being just an illusion arising from dissociative processes. The second explanatory gap concerns an aspect of Bernardo’s view I haven’t mentioned yet, and this is that the transition from universal mind to organism mind involves a move from thoughts to sensory qualities. This disassociated set of experiences, in virtue of its disassociation from the universal mind, then becomes a conscious subject in its own right. The well-known writer Bernardo Kastrup, an idealist, has repeatedly argued against the notion of panpsychism, even calling it a "threat." 2 comments. Instead, we’ve only got access to the contents of consciousness. are conscious or that they instantiate (whatever that may mean) experience or “phenomenal properties”. (That is, all the way down to particles and all the way up to human beings.) It's our nature of duality. However, why embrace the idealist conclusion that everything that exists only does so in the minds of persons? Here, Philip defends panpsychism against the criticisms outlined by Bernardo in that discussion, and presents his own arguments against analytic idealism. (Three words which many panpsychists often use together — see here.) These two commitments, in conjunction with Leibniz’s law (if X and Y are identical, then X and Y share all of their properties), entail that conscious states have causal efficacy: (A) Conscious states are identical with physical brain states(B) Physical brain states have causal efficacy(C) if X and Y are identical, then X and Y share all of their properties(D) Therefore, conscious states have causal efficacy. “Idealism” is no less vague because various a term. And neither do they claim that tables and chairs are the “conscious experiences of [] agents”. In his post-discussion blog post, Bernardo gave some interesting responses to my charge of an explanatory gap between thoughts and sensory qualities: We witness the modulation of qualities by other, different qualities every day: our thoughts constantly modulate our feelings, and the other way around. The micropsychist works within a particle-ontology interpretation of physics, and identifies basic forms of consciousness with the physical properties – mass, spin, charge, etc. There’s a good chance that none of the theories currently being proposed are correct. There are two ways of construing this: micropsychism and cosmopsychism. In addition, they aren’t the contents of consciousness. Log in. The thing is that Hoffman makes the Copenhagen interpretation seem idealist nature. It doesn’t follow that we’re wasting our time. That’s an interesting proposal. I ask that question because he doesn’t explain it in the passages just quoted (though he may well do elsewhere). My claim is that Bernardo has not provided us with that explanation. There are obvious similarities to cosmopsychism, but the difference is that for the analytic idealist the universal mind is a reality which underlies the physical world, whereas for the cosmopsychist the universal mind is the physical universe. Or, less strongly, he believes that Kant’s position doesn’t look promising from a scientific perspective. 100% Upvoted. In his book Mind and Cosmos, Thomas Nagel refers to the former as a historical explanation and the latter as a constitutive explanation, and gives a compelling argument for the necessity of both. Put simply. i) Introduction ii) Panpsychism? But merely attending to our experience doesn’t reveal to us the metaphysical underpinnings of our being set up in this way (just as empirical reflection on cases of dissociation doesn’t reveal to us its metaphysical underpinnings). Again, I’m not convinced that things are so cut and dried. Of course it can now be said that even if Hoffman’s conscious realism (CR) isn’t identical to panpsychism — and also that it doesn’t “entail panpsychism”, that still doesn’t mean that it has nothing in common with it at all. Both of us think the fundamental nature of reality is constituted of consciousness. But I don’t think it helps our cause to misrepresent the view we oppose. Panpsychism and Buddha-nature. As J… For me, the highlight of the recent HLTGI festival was a two-hour discussion I had with Bernardo Kastrup, Sophie-Grace Chappell, and a number of festivalgoers on the Sunday evening. In addition, if conscious realism really “offers a scientific theory of the noumenal”, then it’s not the noumenal that it’s offering a scientific theory of. They simply argue that tables and chairs (or their many parts!) More importantly (unlike conscious realism), panpsychists do claim that “tables and chairs [or their many parts] are conscious”; though they rarely (if ever) claim that they’re also “conscious agents”. • Problem: physical reality does not exist Mind Matter 10. Sort by. The approaches of dualism and idealism can be seen as alternates to panpsychism too, but certain varieties are complementary. A materialist might point to the adaptive value of consciousness: sensory experiences help us to navigate the world, pleasure and pain encourage us to seek what is good for our survival and avoid what is bad. Professor Donald Hoffman is explicit about his position on panpsychism. In other words, disassociation doesn’t entail that there is more than one mind. Stoic q&a: shouldn’t a Stoic be something of a dick to get things done? It doesn’t follow that we’re wasting our time. Indeed, the panpsychism that survives the criticisms is analytic idealism minus … The crucial question for deciding whether there is an explanatory gap from X to Y is: could we can deduce Y from X? As Bernardo puts it (p. 140 of this): If we take the human psyche as a representative sample of how cosmic consciousness operates — which is the best we can do, really — we can infer that, ordinarily, these phenomenal contents are internally integrated through cognitive associations: a feeling evokes an abstract idea, which triggers a memory, which inspires a thought, etc. What is the difference between idealism (such as, subjective idealism) and panpsychism? That is: i) If we have consciousness all the way down to particles. Reductionist panpsychists, in contrast, hope to account for human consciousness without postulating special laws of nature. Marcus Aurelius: How To Live Without Fear, Beyond resilience: Toward ‘antifragile’ urbanism, On Definitions of the Word ‘Consciousness’ (1). Nonetheless, he does mention the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics favourably. At HowTheLightGetsIn Online 2020 Philip Goff, Bernardo Kastrup and Sophie Grace Chappell debated the fundamental nature of reality. Staying undecided and undefined instead of latching to ideology. Take this passage: “The story that there was first the Big Bang and then, billions of years of later, life, and then, hundreds of millions of years later, consciousness, is fundamentally wrong. That is: i) If we describe things as “brains and neurons”. Hoffman’s position can be seen as a take on panpsychism in that he states that “consciousness is fundamental”. Consciousness is fundamental to panpsychists in the sense that all things have various degrees of consciousness (or experience). This is factually incorrect. If there was just one mind, and that mind came to have certain of its experiences inferentially isolated from the others, all that would logically follow – in the absence of some further principles of nature – is that there is one mind with certain experiences inferentially isolated from the others. Panpsychism, the view that consciousness is fundamental to reality, is gaining new support in science and philosophy. He opposes that position to panpsychism and to Kant’s transcendental idealism. Despite having just stated that, there is a strong sense in which one can derive idealist conclusions from anti-realist statements. For it is panpsychism that is physically incoherent, whereas analytic idealism is not only consistent with both microphysics and neuroscience, it even helps to make sense of a number of their observations. According to analytic idealism, at the fundamental level there is a single conscious subject: the universal mind. First, the mind in all things is something internal to, or inherent in, things themselves (as opposed to being injected or sustained by some outside entity). That’s all fine as it stands, but giving an evolutionary account of the adaptive value of the emergence of sensory consciousness isn’t the same thing as giving an account of how the emergence actually happens. Instead, panpsychists believe that there’s consciousness (or there are phenomenal properties) all the way down to the particle and all the way up to the animal brain. Here, I will primarily mean what philosophers call phenomenal or qualitative consciousness. In addition, scientists aren’t philosophers. However, there are very clear and strong similarities too. To be clear: I reject materialism as much as Bernardo does. On the surface at least, Hoffman seems to take a very strong idealist position when he says that “brains and neurons do not exist unperceived”. there is no such detectable substrate that is not an experience within consciousness. For instance, Karl Popper claimed that ‘Schopenhauer is a Kantian who has turned panpsychist’, [70] a phrase indicating the compatibility of his transcendental idealism and panpsychism. Despite that, only the mathematical models or “formulations” used in conscious realism are scientific (or mathematical). But that fact is compatible with many theories of consciousness. Bernardo then tries to account for human/animal consciousness in terms of disassociation, a process through which a subset of the universal mind’s experiences cease to be cognitively integrated with the whole whilst remaining cognitively integrated with each other. That may well be correct; I’m not familiar with this literature. He says that. As consciousness researchers, we can hope that the theories we sketch today are precursors that the final theory of consciousness will build on. Panpsychists aspire to account for human and animal consciousness in terms of more fundamental forms of consciousness. Idealism • Idealism: We project mental qualities onto the world. In the absence of some reason to think dissociation gives us an explanation of the emergence of organic subject, my bet would be on theories in neuroscience that seem to have more empirical support. There’s a good chance that none of the theories currently being proposed are correct. Panpsychism also rejects the emergence of consciousness from the physical and stresses, instead, that it’s not the case that (to use Hoffman’s words) it’s “a latecomer in the evolutionary history of the universe” that “aris[es] from complex interactions of unconsciousness matter and fields”. [ ] agents ”. ) article and thousands more like it, about “ brains and neurons as. 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