Damn: I posted a long quote from Bernardo Kastrup's new book (
Why Materialism is Baloney) believing the quote was included in the free Kindle sampler, but on checking against the full book, I see it wasn't: so I've had to delete the quote because it wouldn't be fair use.
Stoke says:
One advantage of the panpsychist view
is that it does not need to explain how
consciousness arose from insentient matter,
which is perhaps the most vexing,
fundamental and seemingly unsolvable
problem confronting modern science and
philosophy. Consciousness was here from the
start. It is angels all the way down.
Bernardo has something to say about panspsychism, which he believes to be a modern version of animism: everything, even elementary particles, possess a degree of consciousness. It's something that even some hard-core sceptics can give some credence to. But how come that an assemblage of myriad individual conscious particles generates the impression of one high-level consciousness? When we die, presumably that high-level consciousness disappears. Nonetheless, when someone is born, some novel high-level consciousness appears due to some other complex association of myriads of particles.
This doesn't actually explain how the impression of high-level consciousness arises. Somehow, even though there are supposedly countless individual conscious entities even in a single cell, in certain configurations (insert a bit of handwaving here), they may generate that impression. And, they do so for as long as the organism is alive, despite the fact that during that life, the actual particles themselves are constantly being replaced: every few years, in fact (maybe more than once), in any sufficiently long-lived organism.
The elephant in the room is that there must be some pattern according to which assemblages are constructed: especially since the individual elements of the assemblage are interchangeable--one calcium or carbon atom in the array is as good as another. Whence came the pattern? With panpsychism, patterns have to be generated by specific arrays of material particles. The array creates the pattern, but without a preexisting pattern, the array can't exist, so it's a circular argument.
Evolution is the posited answer: over time, arrays could grow more complex and pass on in a "cultural" way their pattern from generation to generation, with gradual additional complexification. But where's the survival advantage in complexification? The most successful organisms, judged by number and biomass, are simple bacteria: by growing more complex, organisms become less successful, and over time, most of them have become extinct.
This implies that there's some kind of utility in complexity that isn't to do with mere survival. And if that's the case, then the whole basis of neo-Darwinism is undermined. Species don't evolve because doing so makes them fitter for survival: in fact, evolving makes them less fit to survive. But what evolution (in the sense of increasing complexity over time, which I don't believe neo-Darwinism explains)
does do is reflect a growing degree of sentience.
This is why I think that the result of evolution is an increase in sentience rather than increased fitness for survival. The image of something that has very low sentience looks like an amoeba: and of something that has very high sentience, like a human being. But that isn't saying that elementary particles possess consciousness, any more than brains do. All things we think of as physical could be considered as simply how processes appear to us in consciousness; as I intimated (and an idea I credit to Bernardo), they are
images of processes in consciousness. That's right: human beings and all organisms (and come to that, elementary particles) are
processes, not
things. This is even reflected in the concept of continual replacement and rearrangement of particles in organisms, which even materialists accept.
The problem, of course, is dualism of various sorts. There are purportedly two realms, the one material, and the other, consciousness. As soon as one thinks that way, one has to explain how the one relates to the other: usually, how one might create the other (explanations can go either way), when in the usual conception of the two, they have separate and distinct characteristics. That's what creates all the arguments and confusions.
In Bernardo's version of Idealism, everything is consciousness, in which processes (might as well call them
thoughts, I suppose) occur. Some of these processes appear to us as images that we think of as
material. Its opposite, materialistic monism, asserts that everything is matter and that consciousness is created by it (as long as it's admitted that the latter's not totally illusory, that is): and the hard problem is precisely how and why as a result we experience qualia. I don't believe panpsychism is an adequate explanation. In my view, nothing that we think of as material has the least consciousness (including the brain), though it
is the image of a process occurring in consciousness.
I appreciate that some won't accept this, and that's their prerogative, of course, but for me it's the most parsimonious explanation of reality that I've come across, and also the most intellectually satisfying. It also sits comfortably with psi, morality and spirituality.