David Bailey
Member
Well, I didn't realize you had panpsychist leanings. I seem to have got the wrong end of the stick again with some of my comments. Although panpsychism is really hard for many people to swallow, I for one would take a theory that says everything is experiential over one that says the non-experiential produces the experiential.
To be honest, though, I don't think it matters very much whether panpsychism or emergentist materialism or something else is the correct theory. No pun intended.
There is an important technical argument against panpsychism. QM requires that each type of particles is indistinuishable - every electron is identical to every other one. This is actually built in to the equations of QM. For example, if you take the wave function of a 2-electron system, it will be a function of X1,Y1,Z1 and X2,Y2,Z2 (the spatial coordinates of both electrons). If you swap any two electrons over, the wave function changes sign, but this has no physical consequences. This makes it damn hard to see how you can attach a 'soul' to a chunk of matter!
If electrons were distinct, QM would give some crazy answers. For example, electrons in a multi-electron atom could all fall into the lowest energy level! Molecules would not hold together!
Emergence just seems to be an intellectual cop-out in this context (not yours, but of those who propose the idea).
David
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