A more popular proposed solution today is emergentism: that mental states emerge from physical states. Psycho-neural identity theory asserts that a mental state simply is its correlated brain state, but a problem therewith is multiple realization: a mental state such as hunger can be correlated to a human brain state but also presumably to, say, an octopus brain state – thus indicating that the mental state cannot be identical to a human brain state. We know that mind and matter can be correlated, but we do not know the nature of that correlation. The question is how something describable in physical, spatiotemporal terms, such as neuronal activity, can relate to something that cannot be described spatiotemporally, such as pain or curiosity. The mind-matter problem, the problem of understanding the relation between mind and matter, has brought human understanding to an impasse. It was Chalmers who renamed the mind-body, or mind-matter problem as the ‘hard problem of consciousness’, and it is perhaps the renewed interest in this problem that has fueled re-interrogation of panpsychism as its solution. The last few decades have brought a renewed interest and advocacy for the theory from the likes of Thomas Nagel, Galen Strawson and David Chalmers. Whitehead, and arguably Bertrand Russell to name but a small number. ‘The plant … is without belief or reason or understanding but has appetite and a sense of pleasure and pain.’ Īs it stands, panpsychism bears a proud history of eminent thinkers – from the very beginnings of western philosophy via thinkers such as Thales and Heraclitus, through to great Renaissance figures such as Patrizi (who coined the term panpsychism) and Bruno, to the mind-matter cognoscenti of the modern era: Spinoza, Leibniz, Schopenhauer, William James, A. Even Plato acknowledged such distinctions, stating that: All has mind though not all has consciousness, let alone self-consciousness. In the hierarchy of states of mind, ‘consciousness’ is an uncommon complex crown of sentience. Panpsychism differentiates within the suffix psyche a vast variety of states of sentience, and it mostly attributes sentience to autopoietic (self-systematic) entities such as organisms and molecules, rather than to aggregates thereof, such as rocks and radiators. It is generally unlike idealism in that it takes matter to be real rather than ideal (as mere projection of the mind) it is generally unlike dualism in that it does not take mind to be separate from matter, but rather takes mind to be a part of matter and it is unlike physicalism as understood to imply that most matter be insentient. Panpsychism is, in itself, a secular doctrine unlike pantheism (that nature is God) and unlike animism (that rivers and winds, etc., each have a spirit). It is thus the doctrine that minds exist fundamentally throughout all of actuality – from humans, to hawks, honeybees through to trees, down to bacteria, mycelia, molecules, and the subatomic below these. The word panpsychism is a Renaissance compound of Ancient Greek pan (all) and psyche (mind, or soul). To listen to this article, please scroll to the bottom. ‘We must learn to understand nature from ourselves, not ourselves from nature.’ 3 Reasons Why Our World is Brimming with Sentience
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |