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here is indeed good empirical justification for the inference that other people and animals, and perhaps even all life forms, are conscious. But there is no empirical justification to infer that inanimate objects, which manifest no external behaviors that anyone could possibly relate to one’s own inner experience, are conscious in any way or to any degree whatsoever. As such, the only possible reason to believe in panpsychism is to make materialism work
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The panpsychist implication that all inanimate objects – as well as all combinations and permutations of objects and parts of objects – have their own separate inner life is:
- Unsupported by evidence. I can only prove to myself that I, as a living being, have a private inner life. To the extent that other living beings display behavior analogous to mine and share the essential feature of metabolism that characterizes me, I feel comfortable enough inferring that they, too, have private inner lives. But I cannot make the same inference about an inanimate object: it neither displays conscious behavior nor does it have metabolism.
- Unfalsifiable. There is no conceivable way to disprove that there is something it is like to be a chair or an isolated neuron, since the only way to check it is to be a chair or an isolated neuron, which I am not.
- Unnecessary. It simply isn't needed to make sense of reality. There is no phenomenon that goes without explanation by denying that chairs have an inner life of their own;
- Inflationary. It implies an exponential explosion of dissociated streams of inner life in the universe.
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It is true that Idealism/Nondualism imply that the universe as a whole has subjective inner life; in other words, that there is something it is like to be the whole universe.
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Actually, panpsychism as understood by philosophers such as David Ray Griffin and Christian DeQuincey (in contrast to the scientists you cite, who seem not to understand the philosophic meaning of panpsychism) is actually much closer to non dualism (and almost identical to some of the world affirming views of the Buddhist and Hindu tantrums) than monistic idealism.
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There is an ontology, very popular in science today because of people like Christophe Koch, Galen Strawson, and even Daniel Dennett (who, in an interview, acknowledged that machines -- and all matter -- have a form of consciousness),
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'Pan - psychism' means literally 'soul everywhere,' which suggests an 'everywhere' outside soul, so soul can be in it. I reject that: 'all-wheres' are in consciousness/soul, in my view. There is a wonderful quote by Henry Corbin that captures this: 'it is the where, the place, that resides in the soul.' (Swedenborg And Esoteric J page 14). I believe the most accurate term for this is 'Idealism,' not 'panpsychism.' If others articulate this ontology under the label 'panpsychism,' very well; what can I do? I would have chosen differently.
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panpsychism does at least represent some recognition of the role of consciousness in the universe. It's possibly a step forwards for materialists who have so far been insisting that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, or even that it doesn't exist at all.
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to look at some of the mystical philosophies, which almost universally set up a mind-matter polarity which is quite similar to some forms of panpsychism, particularly Spinoza's. They of course go further - at least the non-dualist ones - and see both mind and matter as subjective/objective manifestations of an all-inclusive non-mental and non-material principle of Pure Existence/Consciousness.
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what about other conscious animals? Do they cause an EM wave to turn into particles? We don't know. And what about plants which exhibit self awareness by botanist's research? Can they turn a wave into particles as the CO? We don't know. The "gray area" of when biologic life has testable consciousness is unclear. Do single cell organisms show consciousness? Multi celluar? Need just a nervous system (with just ganglia) like worms or a brain (CNS) like a chimpanzee, elephant, or dolphin? The idealists will have to be able to define this "gray area" better to win the debate.
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one of the most interesting developments in 20th-21st century Indian philosophy is the integration of samkhya, Vedanta and Tantra with an evolutionary view. Michael Murphy presents this in a very interesting essay on evolutionary panentheism, which is basically the view undergirding the 14 year efforts of Ed Kelly and his group at Esalen, who produced "Irreducible Mind" and "Beyond Physicalism.' In the West, this seems to me to be the most promising challenge to materialism, whereas in the East - at least in India, I'm not aware of anything as potentially powerful as the work of Ulrich Mohrhoff in physics and the Indian Psychology Institute in psychology.
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