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[Wayne92587]

Consciousness is born of Physical Reality, even our Illusions are of Physical Reality.

It is when consciousness is separated from the Physical that we suffer unnecessarily.

Consciousness is created to be Mankind's Helpmate.

The mind and body are One, the Spirit and the Flesh.

The prophecy of the coming savior of Man was not fulfilled until he walk the Earth having both a Spiritual Body and a Physical Body.

[Dachshund]

J.J. "Jack" Smart became famous overnight after he published a paper called "Are Sensations Brain Processes". This paper was a masterful exercise in rhetoric - in semantic gymnastics - but the bottom line is that qualia like, say phenomenal red ( i.e. the perception in consciousness of the colour red) are not identical in any strict sense with biological brain matter. It is that simple. To argue that they are is nonsense.

Of course, to say that phenomenal properties (qualia) are identical to "brain matter", i.e. to neurons or neural tissue, is to commit an ontological category mistake, since properties (qualities/attributes/features) aren't things (objects/substances) or stuffs; but that's not what reductive materialists (materialist identity theorists) say. What they say is that phenomenal properties are identical to (and composed of) physical/neurological properties of brains, and there's nothing nonsensical about saying so.

Consul,

Let me put it like this. Right now as you are reading this post you are conscious, OK? Right now your (diurnal) consciousness exists. No sane philosopher or scientist denies that phenomenal consciousness exists; i.e. that your phenomenal (diurnal) consciousness at this moment exists as a bone fide component of reality, in its own right. BUT , that is all that we know about it for certain. As to what its "nature" is, as to what "makes it tick", as to what the "stuff" of phenomenal (diurnal/dreaming) consciousness is ( is it a substance of some kind , for example ?), as to where it came from and how, as to why it "behaves" in the way it does in our lived phenomenal experience, as to why it is "structured"/constituted in the way that it is in lived human experience and for what purpose/s (if any ?), etc; WE HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA WHATSOEVER. What human phenomenal consciousness is, how and why, etc it comes to be , and so on, is, in short, still a complete and utter, total mystery. We are also, I should add , aware that human waking and dream consciousness ,while it seems , on the one hand, to be experienced as an holistic, fluid, seamless unity of mental states/events/processes ( i.e. a gestalten) seems, on the other hand, to be discernable as a "collection" of reasonably distinctive and discrete mental contents like: (1) sense perceptions ( visual; colour/shape, auditory, olfactory, gustatory and tactile); (2) bodily sensations, like pain, sensations of cold and heat, itching, etc; (3) propositional attitudes/intentional content;(4) other conceptual content; emotions (anger, love, sorrow, etc); moods (dysthymia, hypomania, major depression, and so on).

Empirical neuroscience has not succeeded (despite a particularly intensive and extensive application of research effort over the past 15-20 years) and never will IMO succeed in any future attempt it makes to try and analyse human phenomenal consciousness or provide any other kind of satisfactory scientific explanatory discourse regarding the nature of human phenomenal/perceptual consciousness, because as Max Plank said, it is, - just to begin with, - impossible for any investigating scientist to "get behind" lived phenomenal human consciousness in order to study it. Philosophers of mind like Chalmers, the Churchlands, Smart, the dual-aspect theorists, etc; are all equally deluded. These people have wasted/are wasting untold years of their professional careers on what is a fool's errand; they will NEVER solve the "hard problem"; but they just don't get it; they are all suckers for punishment and will not be told, that human phenomenal consciousness is clearly (IMO and that of many others far more intelligent and learned than myself), something that human beings experience of a higher, transcendent (supermundane/supernatural) order, one that wholly eclipses our feeble human reason. Chalmers alone, for instance, has published a huge corpus of literature in philosophy of mind describing his assiduous efforts to try and solve the "hard problem", and guess how much progress he has made over the past 20 years ? I'll tell you; it's a big fat ZERO - NOTHING. He has not even scratched the surface of the problem.

It was arguably the greatest scientific genius of the modern era - Sir Isaac Newton - who first remarked that to account for the presence of the image ( "the phantasm") of a flame he was observing as it appeared in his mind was a problem that was "not so easie" ( this, BTW, is the historical origin of the modern term "the hard problem" of consciousness). Since Newton's era it has baffled Einstein, Niels Bohr, Heisenberg, Plank, Hawking and every other brilliant scientist ( and philosopher) to date who has pondered the riddle. A fact which tends ,IMO, to support the thesis that human consciousness is something men and women experience of a higher , transcendent order which we are utterly unable to comprehend.

To continue; getting back to my example of the "yellow dream bird"...if it is an accepted fact (and, as I say, it is) that dream consciousness EXISTS as a real entity in its own right, that is, that it exists as a bone fide objective component of reality (which almost every scientist and philosopher of minds agrees it does), then the components of the dream you are having of the yellow bird flying across the park are also (logically) real, such as the yellow bird itself, as distinct from the background of the sky and parkland it is flying through . I suppose you could say that with regard to this dream bird, I am a "qualia realist"; I am arguing that the phenomenal bright yellow shades that exist within the changing shapes/sizes of the of the outline of the flying dream bird do genuinely exist as actual "objective" components of reality.

To put it another way, lets say that this bright yellow bird is is made of "dream stuff", OK? Now, whatever this "dream stuff" happens to be ( and we have absolutely no idea whatsoever if it is some kind of substance, for ex, or sometime else altogether) , at least one thing is clear, and this is that it that the " dream stuff" of which the yellow bird is constituted is most certainly and assuredly not IDENTICIAL ( strictly speaking, a la a materialist Identity Theorist like Jack Smart) to some particular region of living neural tissue in your sleeping brain and the firing neurons, etc; it contains. For a start, brain tissue appears - to the naked eye - to look like dull-coloured reddish, purplish/greyish goop; it is not bright yellow nor feathery nor does it have any other bird-like attributes at all;( nor do any such features come to light under the microscope).

What do you think ?

Regards

Dachshund

[Sy Borg]

Dachshund, regarding this comment:

These people [Chalmers etc] have wasted/are wasting untold years of their professional careers on what is a fool's errand; they will NEVER solve the "hard problem"; but they just don't get it; they are all suckers for punishment and will not be told, that human phenomenal consciousness is clearly (IMO and that of many others far more intelligent and learned than myself), something that human beings experience of a higher, transcendent (supermundane/supernatural) order, one that wholly eclipses our feeble human reason.

You have made the declaration about human consciousness experience stemming from a "higher, transcendent (supermundane/supernatural) order". Where is your reasoning behind this declaration?

How do you know about this higher order while others like the philosophers you mentioned do not? By what means did you acquire the knowledge about the higher, supermundane order and how might they acquire that knowledge to move beyond their research roadblocks?

[Tamminen]

Dachshund:

I liked your critical comment on the nature of consciousness, and I agree that trying to solve the "hard problem" cannot lead anywhere, because there is no hard problem. But I do not agree that consciousness is something supernatural or supermundane. On the contrary, it is the most natural and most mundane thing there is. Consciousness needs no explanation or wondering, although we can wonder our existence as such. Of course we experience things, how else could it be? Of course we are conscious of something. The philosophical problem is not the being of consciousness. The problem is the being of what we are conscious of: the world, the universe, matter etc. The object of philosophical analysis should be the structure of consciousness, which means the structure of the subject. The main components of this sructure are subjective time, physical space-time and the existence of others.

[Dachshund]

You have made the declaration about human consciousness experience stemming from a "higher, transcendent (supermundane/supernatural) order". Where is your reasoning behind this declaration?

Well Greta...

To be as succinct as possible I will use a sequence of bullet points. (NB: You will need a general knowledge of basic principles of quantum physics to understand the argument).

(1) Quantum physics tells us that everything in the universe is pure energy differing only in its rate of vibration.

(2) Einstein tells us that Energy can be neither created nor destroyed, it is just converted from one form to another. His famous equation E (energy) = m (mass) x c2 (the speed of light squared) says that matter IS EQUAL TO energy .

(3) So, the physical universe was "created" by merely by the process of energy changing from one form to another. The creation and cessation of all things physical is simply manifestation and un-manifestation.

(4) * Quantum physics tells us that that something can only actually come into existence when it is OBSERVED. That means something can only exist because a MIND (consciousness) first thought it into existence. The Bible says that in the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was with God and God was the Word. ( The Word is INFORMATION, and INFORMATION is uncreated and therefore indestructible and eternal). To begin with everything exists primarily as quantum potential or quanta. Quanta, which is energy comes together to form subatomic particles, then, in turn atoms, then molecules, until finally something manifests in the physical world as a localised space-time event that can be observed through the 5 senses.

(5) This energy is also conscious and infinite and is therefore actually infinite living mind. Everything in the universe has its being from this infinite, intelligent Energy.

(6) Imagine that every time this Intelligence moves or thinks an ICICLE is formed in water, exactly corresponding to the thought. We might have countless numbers of icicles of different forms, sizes and colours, but these icicles would still be water (H2O). If we could heat the whole mass all the forms would again become fluent liquid. Nothing would have changed but form. This is all there is to matter.

(7) You are a cluster of energy and so is everything else. A cluster of energy is always in motion, moving and changing to form new configurations at every moment. The computer screen in front of you is not as solid as it appears to be. On a highly magnified scale, you would see that it is in a constant state of flux, "losing" and "gaining" billions of energy packets, but intelligently maintaining the overall look of a computer screen. THERE IS A OBSERVING CONSCIOUSNESS THAT KEEPS THE ENERGY IN THAT PARTICULAR FORM.

(8) When something is no longer observed by consciousness it will cease to exist by un-manifesting back into a state of quantum potentiality or Quanta, Energy. This is why Bible says that it is Christ (the Superconsciousness), who holds all things in the universe together.

(9) Christ is the centre of the universe whose centre is everywhere but circumference nowhere. Christ is the Superconscious, Informatioin and infinite intelligence.

(10) Ultimately all Information, matter and energy are one and the same. Information is Thought, Thought is Consciousness.

Are you following the plot, so far Gretchen ??

(To be continued)

Regards

DAchshund

[Gertie]

@Gretie
I'm not sure if we're on the same page here and defining these terms in the same way.
My understanding is as follows: Panpsychism is a form of property dualism (In this thread, I'm using the the terms interchangeably). If property dualism (PD) is true, then there is only one substance. People who adhere to PD are monists about substances, but accept property dualism. If property dualism is true, then consciousness is an irreducible property of the universe. If PD, then just as things have mass and length, they also have a consciousness (although simple objects would have a very simple form of consciousness).

Substance dualism (SD) is the theory that there is more than one substance. If SD, then there are physical substances and a mental substances. (or physical stuff and soul stuff). People who believe we have souls believe in SD.

Oops sorry I misunderstood the terminology and jumped in half-cocked there!

[Gertie]

Consul

Gertie wrote: ↑
Today, 9:20 am
Except our scientific knowledge of the world doesn't predict or explain conscious emergence, any more than it does eg panpsychism.

Not yet, but the neuroscientists are working hard to solve the hard problem of consciousness and to close the explanatory gap between mind and brain.

...

Gertie wrote: ↑ Today, 9:20 am Subjective experience being associated with brains is simply something we have observed. From testing for neural correlation in humans who we can pretty safely assume to have experiential states like ourselves, we can then assume that other species with similar substra…

As I already said, there's no reason to expect there to be such a phenomenon as plant experience. Arguably, all experiential states are states of animal brains, and the basic structure and function of animal nervous systems is always the same: they are all networks of electrochemically interacting neurons. (This is not to say that there are no differences at all between human brains and other animal brains.)

But there's no established reason not to expect plant or rock experiential states either. And if we're currently relying on similarity to known physical systems (humans), it might be that plant or rock experiential states with very different physical systems have such different experiential states that we wouldn't recognise the clues.

Of course, a myriad of neural processes take place in nervous systems, only some (kinds) of which are both necessary and sufficient for consciousness; and these neural correlates or mechanisms of consciousness haven't yet been identified with sufficient precision and in sufficient microscopic detail. But, again, the neuroscientists are working on it!

And more detailed observations of correlation might give us additional clues as to how/why organic brain experience manifests. Or it might not. For now, the striking observation is that neurons are pretty uniform, simple cells, which has led to speculation that it's the incredibly complex patterns of interactions which are key to experiential states, rather than the nature of the substrate. Which would introduce the possibility of experiencing computers, or the China Brain. Further neuroscientific investigations might only lead to further untestable possibilities, or get nowhere at all. We don't know.

For suggested solutions to the problem of other (conscious) minds, see:

Other Minds > Solutions to the Problem

Also see: Animal Consciousness

Analogical inferences to other (conscious) minds are epistemologically problematic, yet justifiably possible (even if they don't yield objective certainties but only probabilities).

“Many philosophers and scientists have either argued or assumed that consciousness is inherently private, and hence that one's own experience is unknowable to others. While language may allow humans to cross this supposed gap by communicating their experience to others, this is allegedly not possible for other animals. Despite the controversy in philosophical and scientific circles, it remains a matter of common sense to most people that some animals do have conscious experiences. Most people, if asked why they think familiar animals such as their pets are conscious, would point to similarities between the behavior of those animals and human behavior — for example, animals seem to visibly express pleasure and displeasure and a variety of emotions, their behavior seems to be motivated by seeking food, comfort, social contact, etc., they seem aware of their surroundings and able to learn from experience. Similarity arguments for animal consciousness thus have roots in common sense observations. But they may also be bolstered by scientific investigations of behavior and the comparative study of brain anatomy and physiology, as well as considerations of evolutionary continuity between species. Neurological similarities between humans and other animals have been taken to suggest commonality of conscious experience; all mammals share the same basic brain anatomy, and much is shared with vertebrates more generally. Even structurally different brains may be neurodynamically similar in ways that enable inferences about animal consciousness to be drawn.” (Source: see above link!)

Yes as I said, these seem like reasonable inferences based on similarity. And on a side note that means we should take animal welfare much more seriously, the Cambridge Declaration should have been a hugely significant wake up call to us all.

Gertie wrote: ↑ Today, 9:20 am Bottom line, without an established explanatory theory of the relationship between physical processes and experiential states (crucially the necessary and sufficient conditions), or a way to test for experiential states, any or none of current speculations could be on …

The ontology of the mind and its relationship with the brain is one thing, and the epistemology of other minds is another.

Sure.

The philosophy of mind/consciousness is part of what Donald Williams called speculative cosmology; but materialism/physicalism—either its emergentist or its reductionist version—is on the right track. And the assumption that all mental/experiential states are brain states cannot be called purely speculative anymore, because it's strongly supported by scientific evidence.

I don't see how asserting that counters my argument that you don't have sufficient knowledge to assert it. If we're in the position of having to make inferences by analogy to known conscious systems because we don't know the necessary and sufficient conditions for experiential states, isn't there a problem that we won't recognise dissimilar experiential states in dissimilar systems? We're effectively excluding them because they are dissimilar, rather than because we know that only organic brain processes meet the necessary and sufficient conditions. We only rely on analogy because that's the best we can do for now based on the current state of our knowledge.

Mysterianism about the mind-body/brain problem might be true. We human apes might be "cognitively closed" with respect to this problem, i.e. too stupid to solve it (in a humanly intelligible way).

Yes, and that's all I'm saying, this might be the case. Or we might need some new discovery which changes our ideas about how the world works. Or the materialist scientific method might crack it. Nobody knows at this point.

But there's no justification for defeatism until all scientific attempts at solving the hard problem of consciousness have failed; and the neuroscience of consciousness is not at its end but at its beginning, with nobody being able to predict how explanatorily successful it will be in the future. The neuroscientists may be hundreds or thousands of years away from a successful (reductionist-materialist) solution and explanation, but this in no way means that the neuroscience of consciousness is in principle doomed to failure.

Yes of course we should use the scientific toolkit we have available, and solving the neuroscientific 'easy problems' might result in making the Hard Problem dissolve. But we should also recognise there are legitimate questions about its suitability for this job.

Of course, as long as the hard problem is scientifically unsolved and there are explanatory gaps, (antimaterialist) dualists can continue to cling to their wishful "dualism-of-the-gaps".

Nah I don't buy that put down, it's a genuine mystery which on the face of it doesn't look to be amenable to our usual approach to scientific problems, which is all the more reason to keep an open mind.

[BigBango]

Well Greta...

To be as succinct as possible I will use a sequence of bullet points. (NB: You will need a general knowledge of basic principles of quantum physics to understand the argument).

(1) Quantum physics tells us that everything in the universe is pure energy differing only in its rate of vibration.

That fact also tells us that QM is hopelessly inadequate for discovering things like different entities that just happen to be at the same vibrational level, big cells from small rocks or teats from tats. QM is almost the opposite from a microscope. It introduces a plank's constant or a pixel size that blocks any further depth of analysis. We need not therefore assume there is nothing finer in the diner it's the inherent limitations of the instruments that are also made of matter(at the same vibrational level as the objects being observed).

(2) Einstein tells us that Energy can be neither created nor destroyed, it is just converted from one form to another. His famous equation E (energy) = m (mass) x c2 (the speed of light squared) says that matter IS EQUAL TO energy .

(3) So, the physical universe was "created" by merely by the process of energy changing from one form to another. The creation and cessation of all things physical is simply manifestation and un-manifestation.

Ya might ask Dachshund, or at least show some interest, in what was the nature of the form that was changed and what was the nature of the new form? QM would not be my tool of choice.

(4) * Quantum physics tells us that that something can only actually come into existence when it is OBSERVED. That means something can only exist because a MIND (consciousness) first thought it into existence. The Bible says that in the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was with God and God was the Word. ( The Word is INFORMATION, and INFORMATION is uncreated and therefore indestructible and eternal). To begin with everything exists primarily as quantum potential or quanta. Quanta, which is energy comes together to form subatomic particles, then, in turn atoms, then molecules, until finally something manifests in the physical world as a localised space-time event that can be observed through the 5 senses.

Surely, Dachshund, you realize that the standard QM theory has a problem of Solipsism. That is, a researcher may OBSERVE a particle and collapse it's wave form. But how do I know that unless I OBSERVE the researcher OBSERVING the particle, etc. for other people. There is another theory that addresses this problem (I forget it's name). As matter accumulates and clumps together and exchanges particles(photons, etc.) it serves to collapse the wave forms of that clumped matter. Either that implies a pan-psychism, the consciousness of all matter, or simply particle exchanges within matter serve to collapse the waveforms and an external CONSCIOUSNESS is not needed.

(5) This energy is also conscious and infinite and is therefore actually infinite living mind. Everything in the universe has its being from this infinite, intelligent Energy.

(6) Imagine that every time this Intelligence moves or thinks an ICICLE is formed in water, exactly corresponding to the thought. We might have countless numbers of icicles of different forms, sizes and colours, but these icicles would still be water (H2O). If we could heat the whole mass all the forms would again become fluent liquid. Nothing would have changed but form. This is all there is to matter.

OK, so you go for the big God, like Whitehead proposed. HE is the only "actual entity" that does not need to be OBSERVED to be real. That is why Whitehead gets labeled as a Process Theologist. Frankly I prefer pantheism which spreads itself equitably among stuff like salt on a hamburger. It cuts down on all those "spooky actions" at a distance.

(7) You are a cluster of energy and so is everything else. A cluster of energy is always in motion, moving and changing to form new configurations at every moment. The computer screen in front of you is not as solid as it appears to be. On a highly magnified scale, you would see that it is in a constant state of flux, "losing" and "gaining" billions of energy packets, but intelligently maintaining the overall look of a computer screen. THERE IS A OBSERVING CONSCIOUSNESS THAT KEEPS THE ENERGY IN THAT PARTICULAR FORM.

All right already, quit yelling!

(8) When something is no longer observed by consciousness it will cease to exist by un-manifesting back into a state of quantum potentiality or Quanta, Energy. This is why Bible says that it is Christ (the Superconsciousness), who holds all things in the universe together.

Again I prefer pan - theism to pan - psychism.

9) Christ is the centre of the universe whose centre is everywhere but circumference nowhere. Christ is the Superconscious, Informatioin and infinite intelligence.

(10) Ultimately all Information, matter and energy are one and the same. Information is Thought, Thought is Consciousness.

Hold on please. Information is static unless changed by an outside force. Thought is active and is a tool of consciousness.
[/quote]

[Wayne92587]

God is not the word, the Word is God.

[Consul]

Let me put it like this. Right now as you are reading this post you are conscious, OK? Right now your (diurnal) consciousness exists. No sane philosopher or scientist denies that phenomenal consciousness exists; i.e. that your phenomenal (diurnal) consciousness at this moment exists as a bone fide component of reality, in its own right. BUT , that is all that we know about it for certain. As to what its "nature" is, as to what "makes it tick", as to what the "stuff" of phenomenal (diurnal/dreaming) consciousness is ( is it a substance of some kind , for example ?), as to where it came from and how, as to why it "behaves" in the way it does in our lived phenomenal experience, as to why it is "structured"/constituted in the way that it is in lived human experience and for what purpose/s (if any ?), etc; WE HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA WHATSOEVER. What human phenomenal consciousness is, how and why, etc it comes to be , and so on, is, in short, still a complete and utter, total mystery.

What is mysterious is the ontological consciousness-matter relationship, but the subjective, phenomenological nature or essence of consciousness is not a mystery, since we all know it and are introspectively aware of it by virtue of our direct inner acquaintance with it. However, the question is whether the phenomenological nature and structure of the field/stream of consciousness as revealed to introspection is its real essence (in Locke's sense of the term). Reductive physicalists reject the dualistic view that there is nothing more to consciousness and its qualia than what is revealed to introspection, because they believe that its real essence is hidden from introspective access and awareness, with its real essence being purely physicochemical. They claim that our inner perception of our experiences is illusory not in the sense that there aren't really any experiences, but in the sense that we don't innerly perceive them as what they really are, viz. purely physical processes in the brain.

"Let me also be clear that in declaring matter to be a natural mystery, and mind not to be, I am not in any way retracting the 'mysterian' position with respect to consciousness. The nature of experience is not a mystery, if by that we are referring to human knowledge of what experience is (its identity, we might say). What is mysterious, according to me, is how consciousness relates to matter. Indeed, we can only appreciate this mystery if we already have a good idea of what consciousness intrinsically is: if we grasped it purely functionally, we would have no deep sense of mystery. So my view, in sum, is that matter is a mystery and the relation of matter to mind is a mystery, but mind is not itself a mystery (in the special sense intended here). Consciousness, I say, is a nonmysterious thing mysteriously related to a mystery."

(McGinn, Colin. "Two Types of Science." In Basic Structures of Reality: Essays in Meta-Physics, 142-164. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. p. 157)

[McGinn calls matter "a natural mystery", because he's arguing from the point of view of Russellian epistemological structuralism in physics.]

We are also, I should add , aware that human waking and dream consciousness ,while it seems , on the one hand, to be experienced as an holistic, fluid, seamless unity of mental states/events/processes ( i.e. a gestalten) seems, on the other hand, to be discernable as a "collection" of reasonably distinctive and discrete mental contents like: (1) sense perceptions ( visual; colour/shape, auditory, olfactory, gustatory and tactile); (2) bodily sensations, like pain, sensations of cold and heat, itching, etc; (3) propositional attitudes/intentional content;(4) other conceptual content; emotions (anger, love, sorrow, etc); moods (dysthymia, hypomania, major depression, and so on).

Yes, there are different kinds of conscious contents; and regarding the unity of the field of consciousness, there is a "holistic" interpretation—"the no-experiential-parts theory"—and an "atomistic" one—"the experiential-parts theory":

"How is unified conscious experience structured? As we mentioned in Section 2.1, two incompatible models have some currency at the moment. On the experiential parts view (EP), unified conscious experience includes simpler experiences as parts or something like parts; unified consciousness has a mereological aspect. On this view, when I have a unified experience of a pain and a noise, this unified experience includes an experience of just the pain, and an experience of just the noise. These simpler experiences are the relata of unified consciousness; they are joined as parts of the unified experience of the pain and noise together. Experiences a and b are united in a third experience, c, which is their joint occurrence. On the no experiential parts (NEP) account, the conscious mental act through which diverse contents are presented does not have other conscious states, experiences, as parts. On the first view, when I have unified consciousness of experiencing, I am conscious of many experiences. On the second view, I am conscious of just one experience."

Source: The Unity of Consciousness (SEP)

"It could be argued that our basic concept of consciousness is not the notion of a simple phenomenal state—what it is like to such-and-such at a time. Rather, our basic notion of consciousness is that of a total phenomenal state: what it is like to be a subject at a time. This yields a holistic rather than an atomistic view of consciousness. On this approach, we do not start with basic atomic states of consciousness, and somehow glue them together into complex states. Rather, we start with a basic total state of consciousness, and then differentiate it into simpler states, and ultimately into atomic states."

(Tim Bayne and David J. Chalmers: What is the Unity of Consciousness?)

"Here it is useful to contrast atomistic theories of consciousness with holistic theories of consciousness. Current theories tend to take an atomistic or ‘building block’ (Searle 2000) approach to consciousness. Rather than account for the subject’s entire phenomenal field at once, they account for only particular conscious states—a pain, a visual experience, a conscious thought—on a case-by-case basis. Atomistic accounts of consciousness posit one mechanism responsible for making mental states conscious and another for making them co-conscious."

(Tim Bayne: The Unity of Consciousness (Scholarpedia))

Empirical neuroscience has not succeeded (despite a particularly intensive and extensive application of research effort over the past 15-20 years) and never will IMO succeed in any future attempt it makes to try and analyse human phenomenal consciousness or provide any other kind of satisfactory scientific explanatory discourse regarding the nature of human phenomenal/perceptual consciousness, because as Max Plank said, it is, - just to begin with, - impossible for any investigating scientist to "get behind" lived phenomenal human consciousness in order to study it. Philosophers of mind like Chalmers, the Churchlands, Smart, the dual-aspect theorists, etc; are all equally deluded. These people have wasted/are wasting untold years of their professional careers on what is a fool's errand; they will NEVER solve the "hard problem"; but they just don't get it; they are all suckers for punishment and will not be told, that human phenomenal consciousness is clearly (IMO and that of many others far more intelligent and learned than myself), something that human beings experience of a higher, transcendent (supermundane/supernatural) order, one that wholly eclipses our feeble human reason. Chalmers alone, for instance, has published a huge corpus of literature in philosophy of mind describing his assiduous efforts to try and solve the "hard problem", and guess how much progress he has made over the past 20 years ? I'll tell you; it's a big fat ZERO - NOTHING. He has not even scratched the surface of the problem.

Yes, he has. (This is not to say that his naturalistic dualism offers the best ontological solution.)

I don't see any good reasons to be as pessimistic as you are. As I already said several times, the neuroscience of consciousness is still in its infancy, and the currently available neuroimaging technology is still much too representationally coarse-grained to reveal all the relevant structural and functional details on the molecular level. You mustn't forget that the human brain (with its ~90 billion neurons) is the most complex and complicated physical system in the known universe. So I don't expect neuroscientists to be able to solve the hard problem and to close the explanatory gap within a few decades. Of course, there is no guarantee that they will ever succeed in doing so, but on the other hand there is no justification for the assertion that the hard problem is scientifically unsolvable in principle and that the explanatory gap is scientifically unclosable in principle.

Consciousness doesn't belong to "a higher, transcendent (supermundane/supernatural) order." It is a mundane, natural/physical phenomenon. To be conscious is to have a conscious life, with consciousness being a child of natural biological evolution. It's a natural state of living organisms or their brains. We don't know (yet) how the electrochemical processes in (central) nervous systems realize conscious states, but there is little doubt that they do (in a perfectly natural way which is perfectly consistent with the laws of physics.)

"I think at this point the most sane and sober conclusion is that we simply do not know enough to see how experience emerges from the non-experiential, if it does. Admitting ignorance is unsatisfying and perhaps professionally embarrassing for philosophers, but there are times when it is folly or hubris to do more. Let us mention some sobering facts. We have been investigating the human nervous system seriously for a mere one hundred and fifty years or so. The human brain is the most complex object in the known universe and, professional pride of some neuroscientists notwithstanding, we have probably only begun to scratch the surface of what there is to know. I see no reason why a decisive breakthrough is likely to be round the corner in five or ten or fifty years. Perhaps it will be several hundred years before we have even a fair grasp of the detailed facts about how the brain works. Perhaps we will never know because its scale and complexity will defeat our collective intellectual capacity. Perhaps it will require us to come up with concepts of an audacity that rivals that of quantum theory or a complexity which requires us to rely on computers to do almost all of the work before we can adequately capture the facts. In these circumstances, it would I think be presumptuous to suppose that because we are currently unable to see how the emergence might work, that there can be no natural emergence. The emergence of consciousness is arguably the most untransparent transition in the history of the universe: it is uniquely difficult, so to suppose we can from our present state of rather doleful ignorance pronounce the natural emergence of conscious experience from the non-experiential as conclusively impossible is in its own way as presumptuous as those who think we'll have the answer in the next five years."

(Simons, Peter. "The Seeds of Experience." In: Galen Strawson et al., Consciousness and its Place in Nature, edited by Anthony Freeman, 146-150. Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2006. pp. 148-9)

It was arguably the greatest scientific genius of the modern era - Sir Isaac Newton - who first remarked that to account for the presence of the image ( "the phantasm") of a flame he was observing as it appeared in his mind was a problem that was "not so easie" ( this, BTW, is the historical origin of the modern term "the hard problem" of consciousness). Since Newton's era it has baffled Einstein, Niels Bohr, Heisenberg, Plank, Hawking and every other brilliant scientist ( and philosopher) to date who has pondered the riddle. A fact which tends ,IMO, to support the thesis that human consciousness is something men and women experience of a higher , transcendent order which we are utterly unable to comprehend.

We human apes might be too stupid to solve the hard problem/to close the explanatory gap, but we don't know if we are before we've arrived at the historical end of science. But science is an open-ended work in progress, and nobody can predict its future successes or failures.

We are all baffled by the riddle of consciousness, but it's a natural/physical mystery. There's nothing supernatural/hyperphysical or "magical" about it. It's made by Nature, not by God! It fully belongs to the immanent order of MEST (the matter-energy-spacetime world). As Donald Williams puts it, "ideas and experience are made of the same space-time stuff as the rest of physical nature."

To continue; getting back to my example of the "yellow dream bird"...if it is an accepted fact (and, as I say, it is) that dream consciousness EXISTS as a real entity in its own right, that is, that it exists as a bone fide objective component of reality (which almost every scientist and philosopher of minds agrees it does), then the components of the dream you are having of the yellow bird flying across the park are also (logically) real, such as the yellow bird itself, as distinct from the background of the sky and parkland it is flying through . I suppose you could say that with regard to this dream bird, I am a "qualia realist"; I am arguing that the phenomenal bright yellow shades that exist within the changing shapes/sizes of the of the outline of the flying dream bird do genuinely exist as actual "objective" components of reality.

To put it another way, lets say that this bright yellow bird is is made of "dream stuff", OK? Now, whatever this "dream stuff" happens to be ( and we have absolutely no idea whatsoever if it is some kind of substance, for ex, or sometime else altogether) , at least one thing is clear, and this is that it that the " dream stuff" of which the yellow bird is constituted is most certainly and assuredly not IDENTICIAL ( strictly speaking, a la a materialist Identity Theorist like Jack Smart) to some particular region of living neural tissue in your sleeping brain and the firing neurons, etc; it contains. For a start, brain tissue appears - to the naked eye - to look like dull-coloured reddish, purplish/greyish goop; it is not bright yellow nor feathery nor does it have any other bird-like attributes at all;( nor do any such features come to light under the microscope).

First of all, I'm a qualia realist too, a realist about subjective, experiential "impressions" (sensations, emotions) and "ideas" (mental images). Qualia (experiential/phenomenal qualities) are real entities that are constitutive of and essential to conscious states.

Yes, dream consciousness is as real as waking consciousness, being a form of imagination (which I think is the mental simulation of sensation/sensory perception).

There is a relevant distinction between the "transcendent" intentional object of an act or event of imagining and its "immanent" content, which consists of mental images in subjects' minds/brains. When you dream of a yellow bird, the intentional object of this case of somniatory imagination is a yellow bird and its content is a mental image or series of mental images of a yellow bird.

Your phrase "dream bird" is ambiguous, because it either means "dreamt-of bird" or "dream-image of a bird". A dreamt-of bird can be a real bird and it can be an unreal, purely imaginary one; but in either case, there is no real or unreal bird in the dreamer's mind/brain but only a bird-image, which is not a bird.

When you dream of a yellow bird, you imagine a bird by experiencing bird-images. As I already said, I think mental images are simulative/imaginative percepts ("quasi-percepts"), i.e. mental simulations of sense-impressions such as shaped patches of (phenomenal) color, e.g. (phenomenal) yellow.
That is, what you experience when you dream of a yellow bird are imaginative color-qualia such as a yellow-quale.

According to materialist qualia reductionism, all qualia, including all the quasi-visual ones experienced by dreamers, are complex or structural physical properties of the subject's brain. But they certainly don't mean to say that when a neuroscientist sees your brain or processes therein while you're seeing or imagining a yellow bird, it/they will look yellow to him. Of course, it won't. To say that qualia are neurological properties is not to say that there is no difference between their being experienced or internally (introspectively) perceived/observed by the subject whose brain instantiates them and their being externally perceived/observed by another subject. Seeing a physical quale (in a brain) is not the same as having and feeling it! Externally perceiving a yellow-quale is qualitatively very unlike experiencing it, because it doesn't itself involve any yellow-qualia. A physical yellow-quale you experience wouldn't look yellow to an external observer or to yourself, if you externally observed your own brain.

The important point is that this perceptual or perspectival difference doesn't entail an ontological difference between qualia and neurological properties. According to (internalist) qualia physicalism, a yellow-quale is a (complex) physical/neurological property of a brain; but this doesn't mean that those neurological properties which are yellow-qualia (or the neurological processes including them) look yellow to external observers.

[Consul]

(1) Quantum physics tells us that everything in the universe is pure energy differing only in its rate of vibration.

It is far from clear what quantum physics tells us about ultimate reality, what the ontological implications of quantum mechanics are!

"Quantum mechanics is, at least at first glance and at least in part, a mathematical machine for predicting the behaviors of microscopic particles — or, at least, of the measuring instruments we use to explore those behaviors — and in that capacity, it is spectacularly successful: in terms of power and precision, head and shoulders above any theory we have ever had. Mathematically, the theory is well understood; we know what its parts are, how they are put together, and why, in the mechanical sense (i.e., in a sense that can be answered by describing the internal grinding of gear against gear), the whole thing performs the way it does, how the information that gets fed in at one end is converted into what comes out the other. The question of what kind of a world it describes, however, is controversial; there is very little agreement, among physicists and among philosophers, about what the world is like according to quantum mechanics."

Source: Quantum Mechanics (SEP)

"Despite its status as a core part of contemporary physics, there is no consensus among physicists or philosophers of physics on the question of what, if anything, the empirical success of quantum theory is telling us about the physical world."

Source: Philosophical Issues in Quantum Theory (SEP)

"What, then, does quantum mechanics tell us about the fundamental nature of physical reality? At the moment, not very much. There are several approaches to quantum mechanics, any or none of which might yield an acceptable physical theory. According to some approaches, the world is deterministic, and according to others it is indeterministic. According to some there are particles at the fundamental level and according to others there are only waves (in a high-dimensional space). According to one, the contents of the universe, including people, are constantly branching into multiple copies. The question of which theory is correct is in part a matter of empirical investigation by experimental physics. But in part it is a matter of theoretical investigation, by both physicists and philosophers, since it is not clear what the phenomena are that must be captured by an empirically adequate theory, and it is not clear what each theory entails about the phenomena. It is not even clear how many distinct theories there are. In the meantime, any metaphysical claim of the form 'Quantum mechanics shows that ...' should be treated with suspicion."

(Lewis, Peter J. "Metaphysics and Quantum Physics." In The Routledge Companion to Metaphysics, edited by Robin Le Poidevin, Peter Simons, Andrew McGonigal, and Ross P. Cameron, 517-526. Abingdon: Routledge, 2009. p. 525)

"[Quantum mechanics] is a theory in which we have no idea what we are talking about, because we have no idea what (if anything) the basic mathematical structures of the theory represent." (p. 23)

"So very little can be concluded unconditionally on the basis of quantum mechanics: Metaphysical claims of the form "Quantum mechanics shows that ..." need to be treated very carefully, and in their full generality are likely to be false. However, this doesn't mean that thinking about quantum ontology is a useless exercise. The empirically informed debate over ontological issues generated by quantum mechanics is often quite unlike the standard debates over these issues, and the range of possibilities entertained is often different, too. Even if quantum mechanics doesn't settle many ontological questions, it shifts the debate in interesting and fruitful ways. Furthermore, the metaphysical consequences of the various interpretations of quantum mechanics may, in some cases, reflect back on the tenability of those interpretations. If an interpretation cannot yield a coherent metaphysical picture of the world, then it cannot be regarded as an adequate descriptive theory.
Quantum mechanics is fascinating and frustrating. Its phenomena are astonishingly difficult to fit into any coherent ontological framework. The frameworks we end up with are fascinatingly revisionary but also frustratingly problematic. The best we can say is that not everything in our received classical worldview can be right." (p. 182)

(Lewis, Peter J. Quantum Ontology: A Guide to the Metaphysics of Quantum Mechanics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.)

(2) Einstein tells us that Energy can be neither created nor destroyed, it is just converted from one form to another. His famous equation E (energy) = m (mass) x c2 (the speed of light squared) says that matter IS EQUAL TO energy.

No, it doesn't, strictly speaking, because mass is not the same as matter.
See: The Equivalence of Mass and Energy > Misconceptions about E = mc²

[Sy Borg]

Are you following the plot, so far Gretchen ??

Thanks for that detailed reply.

One particular aspect stood out for me:

(4) * Quantum physics tells us that that something can only actually come into existence when it is OBSERVED. That means something can only exist because a MIND (consciousness) first thought it into existence. The Bible says that in the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was with God and God was the Word. ( The Word is INFORMATION, and INFORMATION is uncreated and therefore indestructible and eternal). To begin with everything exists primarily as quantum potential or quanta. Quanta, which is energy comes together to form subatomic particles, then, in turn atoms, then molecules, until finally something manifests in the physical world as a localised space-time event that can be observed through the 5 senses.

I personally disagree with the Copenhagen interpretation. As Einstein noted, the Moon is there (with its gravitational and other physical effects) whether we observe it or not. The concept, the mental construct known as "The Moon", is what is created with observation.

However, at the quantum scale, our observations are significant. If quanta are the fundamental building blocks of reality (maybe), then they effectively act like pixels, as information.

So it will then follow that thoughts logically consist of the transfer of quantum information. At some point quantum information from your brain followed a path to mine (and to whomever read your post). When thoughts travel into the subtle and sensitive conditions of quantum experiments, I suspect that the observations shape it rather than create results.

I consider the observation of quantum phenomena as akin to breathing on a house of cards. So any photons used to observe a quantum experiment simply buffets the entire edifice around, like trying to observe a matchstick structure by throwing rocks at it and measuring the impact points.

So, if thoughts are the movement of organised information, then the anomalous QM experiments where future intent is seemingly found to change experiments in the present become more comprehensible - it's the thoughts of the researchers inadvertently shaping the experimental results. That would make the situation one of local conditions (the experimenters' thoughts, intents and design of the experiment) simply impacting the experiment.

Maybe.

[BigBango]

Yes Greta, we can forget about QM as a tool for the ultimate in ontology.

It's like putting blinders on a racehorse so it is not distracted.

There are "Natural" layers to the world that have not been explicated. These layers can be explicated with a little imagination. It will change the dialogue we are having dramatically.

I have used an analogy of our problem with "animation" before. It stated that there were aliens orbiting the earth and their scanners could see vehicles, like cars and trucks running around but their resolution wasn't strong enough to see the people getting in and out of them. So they had big arguments like us that were attempts to explain why the vehicles were alive and whether or not the vehicles themselves were conscious. They obviously exhibited purposeful behavior, collecting in groups and seeking food stations, etc.. Fractus from the planet Fracto asserted that there were vehicles in the vehicles that were alive and conscious and steering the vehicles from inside the vehicles. However he was chastised for not having read Wittgus writings from the galaxy Tractco in which he clearly showed that the car inside steering the car outside was just as hard to explain. He said that was like a Humunculous. Quantum Mechanicus was no help since all he could discover was energy waves or vehicles but not both. They did see collisions of vehicles and saw the tires coming off which seemed to kill the vehicles. That led to the theory that the tires were alive and the vehicles wouldn't have "Phenomenal Experiential" states without them.

Surely before microbes were discovered under microscopic vision they were theorized about and those researchers were laughed at, while ridiculous theories of the spreading of disease flourished.

We are at that stage folks. Quit laughing at me.

We are a young world, 14 Billion or so, we are expanding faster and faster. Our technology is laughably primitive, even with space X. In four billion years we better have Tesla's Electrodynamic Cannon rebirthed and start nudging our earth/star system so we won't get sucked into Andromeda's Black Hole Center or thrown off into space to who knows where. So an aging world will show greater and greater forms of technology that will play significant roles in the cosmology of the world. What preceded our Big Bang. As Penrose is asserting it was a collapsing world. I think we can assume a collapsing world is an old world. How old? Maybe 100 billion years or so. If wee don't eventually slow our expansion we will just eventually be all alone and have only a history of the world of galaxies that used to be. A Theory that will eventually die. Hopefully we will stop expanding and will also face a Big Crunch. To escape that crunch we will need TECHNOLOGY.

Seeing the Big Crunch coming will send all the advanced techy societies fleeing their galactic cores. That is what happened before the BB. After all their galactic centers collided they simply waited for the plasma to cool then returned to the aftermath seeking dwindling energy reserves. What they discovered was their galactic centers were now crushed together into what we recognize as atoms. Galactic centers became the quarks of nuclei. The upshot is that their relative size would then have been only slightly bigger than a plank volume. But they were lock and loaded with Electodynamic Cannons that could suck an blast an election off its normal course or flatten the shape of a protein molecule.

Just what do you think they did with all that technological fire power? They built themselves some VEHICLES, that we now call CELLS.

[Consul]

But there's no established reason not to expect plant or rock experiential states either.

Yes, there is an "established reason" not to do so, namely that consciousness/experience depends on (central) nervous systems.

"Then there is the question of the need for a brain.We normally suppose that one of these is pretty useful when it comes to having a mind, indeed a sine qua non (even if it’s made of silicon); we suppose that, at a minimum, a physical object has to exhibit the right degree of complexity before it can make a mind. But the panpsychist is having none of it: you get to have a mind well before even organic cells come on the market, before molecules indeed. Actually, you get mentality—experience—at the point of the Big Bang, fifteen billion years before brains are minted. So brains are a kind of contingency, a kind of pointless luxury when it comes to possessing mental states. It becomes puzzling why we have them at all, and why they are so big and fragile; atoms don’t need them, so why do we? And this puzzle only becomes more severe when we remind ourselves that the panpsychist has to believe in full-throttle pre-cerebral mentality— genuine experiences of red and pangs of hunger and spasms of lust. As Eddington puts it, the mental world that we are acquainted with in introspection is a window onto the world of the physical universe, and the two are qualitatively alike: introspection tells us what matter is like from the inside, whether it is in our brain or not. But then the brain isn’t necessary for the kind of experiential property it reveals to us; it is only necessary for the revealing to occur. What is revealed by introspection is spread over the entire physical universe. In fact, it would not be stretching a point to say that all bits of matter—from strings, to quarks, to atoms, to molecules, to cells, to organs, to animals—are themselves brains. There can be brains without brains! But if so, why bother with brains?"

(McGinn, Colin. "Hard Questions: Comments on Galen Strawson." Journal of Consciousness Studies 13, no. 10/11 (2006): 90–99. pp. 96-7)

"Why do we have complex brains at all if they are so dispensable in the functioning of our minds? Why does brain damage obliterate mental faculties if minds do not owe their existence to brains? Why were there not minds floating about before brains ever evolved? Why are all mental changes actually accompanied by brain changes? The fact is that minds have their deep roots in brains. They are not just temporary residents of brains, like wandering nomads in the desert. Deracinate them and they lose their handle on reality. Minds don't merely occupy brains, they are somehow constituted by brains. That is why the minds of different species vary, why minds develop in concert with brains, why the health of your brain makes all the difference to the life of your mind. Minds and brains are not ships that pass in the night; the brain is the very lifeblood of the mind."

(McGinn, Colin. The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World. New York: Basic Books, 1999. pp. 27-8)

And more detailed observations of correlation might give us additional clues as to how/why organic brain experience manifests. Or it might not. For now, the striking observation is that neurons are pretty uniform, simple cells, which has led to speculation that it's the incredibly complex patterns of interactions which are key to experiential states, rather than the nature of the substrate. Which would introduce the possibility of experiencing computers, or the China Brain. Further neuroscientific investigations might only lead to further untestable possibilities, or get nowhere at all. We don't know.

If you want to create artificial conscious minds you need to create artificial brains that are structurally and functionally equivalent to natural brains. It's no accident that natural consciousness is realized in and by biological wetware. This is not to say that it's absolutely impossible for non-biological hardware to generate consciousness, but only that if it's possible, it's not the case that any old non-biological hardware can do so.

By the way, mere descriptions of neural correlates of consciousness aren't explanations. The Finnish neuroscientist Antti Revonsuo writes that "[c]onsciousness is a higher level of biological organization" and calls it "the phenomenal level of organization" (in the CNS) (Consciousness: The Science of Subjectivity, 2010, p. 287). So what a reductive neuroscientific explanation requires is the discovery of those neural mechanisms of consciousness/experience which constitute and are the phenomenal level of neurological organization.

The philosophy of mind/consciousness is part of what Donald Williams called speculative cosmology; but materialism/physicalism—either its emergentist or its reductionist version—is on the right track. And the assumption that all mental/experiential states are brain states cannot be called purely speculative anymore, because it's strongly supported by scientific evidence.

I don't see how asserting that counters my argument that you don't have sufficient knowledge to assert it. If we're in the position of having to make inferences by analogy to known conscious systems because we don't know the necessary and sufficient conditions for experiential states, isn't there a problem that we won't recognise dissimilar experiential states in dissimilar systems? We're effectively excluding them because they are dissimilar, rather than because we know that only organic brain processes meet the necessary and sufficient conditions. We only rely on analogy because that's the best we can do for now based on the current state of our knowledge.

The epistemically best-justified—because scientifically best-confirmed—assumption/belief is the one that (certain kinds of) electrochemical processes in animal brains are both necessary and sufficient for experiential states. So we can justifiedly exclude nonanimals from the class of conscious beings.

There are three basic classes of natural beings/things in the world:

1. nonconscious nonliving ones
2. nonconscious living ones
3. conscious living ones

Of course, panpsychists think this list is incomplete, adding

4. conscious nonliving ones.

And if the prefix "pan-" (= "all") is taken literally, then panpsychists even claim that the classes 1&2 are empty, thinking that all living or nonliving beings are conscious.

There's no reason to take phytopsychism (the view that plants are conscious beings) seriously, but plants are living beings, biological organisms at least; so phytopsychism is not as crazy as e.g. lithopsychism (the view that stones or rocks are conscious beings). What makes panpsychism especially absurd is its dissociation of consciousness from life.

"Panpsychism is surely one of the loveliest and most tempting views of reality ever devised; and it is not without its respectable motivations either. There are good arguments for it, and it would be wonderful if it were true—theoretically, aesthetically, humanly. Any reflective person must feel the pull of panpsychism once in a while. It’s almost as good as pantheism! The trouble is that it’s a complete myth, a comforting piece of utter balderdash. Sorry Galen, I’m just not down with it (and isn’t there something vaguely hippyish, i.e. stoned, about the doctrine?)."

(McGinn, Colin. "Hard Questions: Comments on Galen Strawson." Journal of Consciousness Studies 13, no. 10/11 (2006): 90–99. p. 93)

I agree with McGinn—although I don't see any good arguments for panpsychism and wouldn't find its truth "wonderful".

Arguments for and against panpsychism:

"(1) Argument by Indwelling Powers—all objects exhibit certain powers or abilities that can plausibly be linked to noetic qualities.
(2) Argument by Continuity—a common principle or substance exists in all things; in humans, it accounts for the soul or the mind, and thus by extrapolation it infers mind in all things. Also expressed as a rejection of the problem of 'drawing a line' somewhere, non-arbitrarily, between enminded and supposedly mindless objects.
(3) Argument from First Principles—mind is posited as a fundamental and universal quality, present individually in all things; this is a kind of 'panpsychism by definition.'
(4) Argument by Design—the ordered, complex, and/or persistent nature of physical things suggests the presence of an inherent mentality.
(5) Argument from Non-Emergence—it is inconceivable that mind should emerge from a world in which no mind existed; therefore mind always existed, in even the simplest of structures. Also expressed as 'nothing in the effect that is not in the cause.' Sometimes called the 'genetic' argument—see below.
(6) Theological Argument—God is mind and spirit, and God is omnipresent, therefore mind and spirit are present in all things. Or, all things participate in God and thus have a share in spirit.
(7) Evolutionary Argument—A particular combination of Continuity and Non-Emergence arguments. Claims that certain objects (e.g. plants, the Earth) share a common dynamic or physiological structure with human beings, and thus possess a mind; and, points to the continuity of composition between organic and inorganic substances (i.e. anti-vitalism).
(8) Argument from Dynamic Sensitivity—The ability of living systems to feel and to experience derives from their dynamic sensitivity to their environment; this holds true for humans and, empirically, down to the simplest one-celled creatures. By extension, we know that all physical systems are dynamic and interactive, and therefore all, to a corresponding degree, may be said to experience and feel. Additionally, other aspects of dynamical systems theory support the panpsychist view (a combination of the Indwelling Powers, Continuity, and Non-Emergence arguments).
(9) Argument from Authority—Not a formal argument, but a potentially convincing claim nonetheless. Writers as diverse as Bruno, Clifford, Paulsen, and Hartshorne have cited the large number of major intellectuals who expressed intuitive or rational belief in some form of panpsychism.
… The above nine arguments constitute the historical case for panpsychism.
…To the above list we may add the following:
(10) Panpsychism 'truly naturalizes mind,' because it deeply integrates mind into the natural order of the world. Furthermore it does so in a way that no other theory does. Though this basic feeling has been expressed by others, it has not been presented as a core argument. I will designate this as the Naturalized Mind Argument.
(11) In the light of 'the 'terminal' failure of the approaches built on the Cartesian intuition about matter,' panpsychism stands as the most viable alternative. This is an important point, and one that has been neglected in the past. If intensive critical inquiry of dualism and materialism over the past, say, few hundred years has failed to produce a consensus theory of mind, then it stands to reason that a third alternative like panpsychism, in some positive formulation, should gain in validity. This 'negative argument' for panpsychism may be called, for want of a better name, the Last Man Standing Argument.
…… [A] twelfth and final argument for panpsychism, which I will call the Greater Virtue argument:
(12) Panpsychism is the superior worldview because it leads to a more integrated, compassionate, and sympathetic cosmos. It is, they [Empedocles, (Theodor) Fechner, (William) James, and (Gregory) Bateson] suggest, life-affirming and life-enhancing. It leads to positive, sustaining values for humanity. It stands in stark contrast to the cynical, isolating, manipulative values of mechanistic materialism. To the extent that these mechanistic values have contributed to our current environmental and social crisis, panpsychist values may begin to reverse this process and heal the damage." (pp. 250-52 + 268)

"We may identify six cogent and substantial objections to panpsychism in general.

(1) Inconclusive Analogy—The purported analogical basis between humans and other objects is groundless.
(2) Not Testable—There are no 'new facts' or empirical basis on which to evaluate the panpsychist claim. Also known as the No Signs objection. This includes the assumption that non-verifiable theories are invalid in some fundamental sense.
(3) Physical Emergence—Emergence is in fact possible because we see it in other realms of the physical world; mind is not ontologically unique; hence emergence of mind is conceivable.
(4) Combination Problem—Sub-minds, such as those of atoms, cannot be conceived to combine or sum into complex, unified minds such as humans have. Hence panpsychism is not an adequate account of mind.
(5) Implausibility—Panpsychism is so implausible and counter-intuitive that it cannot be true. Also known as the reductio ad absurdum objection.
(6) Eternal Mystery—The mind-body problem is unsolvable in principle, and hence panpsychism, which purports to offer a solution. must be false." (pp. 264-65)

(Skrbina, David. Panpsychism in the West. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007.)

Nah I don't buy that put down, it's a genuine mystery which on the face of it doesn't look to be amenable to our usual approach to scientific problems, which is all the more reason to keep an open mind.

As the saying goes: "Keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out!"

[Consul]

(9) Christ is the centre of the universe whose centre is everywhere but circumference nowhere. Christ is the Superconscious, Informatioin and infinite intelligence.

Holy Christ! I'm sorry, but that's gibberish.