Philosophy Now Forum

Chaz, I'm curious. How do you explain the relationship between mind and body, or experience and matter?

So what happens when your idea can be explained by a more comprehensive and simple explanation? Then I would adopt the simpler and more comprehensive explanation. Panpsychism says there is fundamentally only one kind of stuff in the world and it has both a material and an experiential aspect. That ...

So in other words phenomenal experience just magically pops into existence when neurons are firing in a brain. ... What do you mean by "phenomenal experience" in this instance? I will let MGL say what he or she means by the term, but what I mean by it is just ordinary experience, what we ...

I see much of this type of discussion amounting to a situating of knowledge. As if the terms of knowledge are granting us real things. I have difficulty making experiments on this type of uncontrolled 'controls'. Which term is the control group? Which term is the base ground upon or around which we...

... a rock 'experiencing' the ground at the termination of its fall from the cliff. The rock doesn't experience anything. The subatomic "particles" (in quotes because the term is misleading) do, in a primordial way. This argument would make more sense if you read my paper on it: http://ww...

That is interesting. Sounds like an objective version of existentialism, but I do not see any help for Panpsychism, eh? According to Whitehead, each actual occasion (smallest unit of reality; sort of like a quantum event) has awareness. In a primordial way it experiences its past and its present su...

From what I have collected from Whitehead's, Russell's thinking as logicians, positivism etc - i find it puzzling to see them named in this context. In the later part of his life Whitehead propounded a very comprehensive metaphysics that posited process, rather than substance, as the fundamental ca...

attofishpi wrote:...the universe from an 'energy' state of consideration can be considered 'alive'.

Could you please elaborate on that thought? What does it mean and what leads you to believe it?

I personally don't like the terms pan-psychism or mindstuff as it has the effect of distracting some people from the actual argument and encouraging ridicule as a poor substitute for criticism. What would you suggest instead? Are you familiar with the Process Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead an...

MGL is definitely on to the issue, which is how mind and body are related. 1) the correlation between brain states and conscious experience does not explain where the sensations of redness, pain etc come from. Right. This is the so-called "hard problem" of consciousness. If everything is b...

your psychological thesis is utterly metaphysical. Yes, it is a metaphysical thesis. It is a claim about the ultimate nature of reality, not about anybody's psychology. It may well be that mind is just our thinking that we have mind If we are thinking, then we have mind. That's what thinking is. I ...

chaz wyman wrote:Were this phenomenon not present in the universe, what difference would we experience?

We would not experience anything if experience were not present in the universe.

reasonemotion wrote:WHY DOES ANYTHING EXIST? FOR WHAT PURPOSE.

Because it is more fun that way. That is the answer given by various mystical traditions such as Vendanta, Sufism and so forth. The One differentiated itself into many in order more fully to know itself and enjoy the drama it had thereby created.

There seems to be a bit of a resurgence of interest recently in Panpsychism, the idea that everything has an aspect of psyche or mind to it. I've been reading Galen Strawson and others on the subject and would like to discuss the topic here. I have written a summary of some of the arguments in favor...

I have several problems with Mark's two-part piece. First he says morality does not exist, where "morality [is] conceived as a universal injunction external to our desires." But he does not say why he believes morality does not exist. He just goes on about what he is going to do now that h...