Philip Goff Philip Pullman moderator, Nigel Warburten
transcript of podcast @ https://lithub.com/philip-goff-and-philip-pullman-talk-materialism-panpsychism-and-philosophical-zombies/ .... PG: You only get rich, human experience after millions of years of evolution. So the basis constituent is consciousness but it doesn’t mean every combinations of particles is conscious; it doesn’t meant the table is conscious, for example. NW: Well, it does mean it is conscious on some level, doesn’t it? PG: The things that make it up are conscious but maybe the table as a whole does not necessarily have its own experience. So, are you maybe sympathetic to the view that something distinctively human is kind of fundamental to the universe? PP: Not to the universe; that couldn’t be possible if we believe the universe jumped into being with the Big Bang 14 billion years ago, or whatever it was. But yes, I do think there is something distinctive about human beings, which is our ability to reflect on our own experience. If I believe that glass of water is conscious maybe it is, but it’s not doing much reflecting. As far as we know. Maybe it’s in conversation with your glass. But ah, yes, in the stories I’ve written, clearly human self-consciousness, human awareness, came into being 30, 40 thousand years ago, something like that, and it’s based of course, on the coming of artistic, the remains of art. Cave paintings, the carvings on stones, that sort of thing. That seems to be a time when people were becoming interested in other things than where the next meal was. So yeah, I do think the sort of consciousness we could be able to display now and we display every day, did kind of emerge from something that was less conscious. NW: That’s still a problem for a panscientist isn’t it? You have lots of little bits of conscious stuff and then you have this thing that can reflect on what matter is and whether it’s conscious or not. PG: Look, all these views have problems and there is, it’s early days, in my view, of the science of consciousness. I suppose it seems to me that the challenges facing a panpsychist research program look to be more tractable than the problems facing, say, [an eliminative] materialist. The core of [eliminative] materialism as I’ve already labored, is you have this huge, explanatory gap between the purely quantitative objective properties, and the qualitative subjective, and I don’t think you’ve made any–– whereas the explanatory gap for the panpsychic is how did you get from very simple forms of consciousness to very complex forms of consciousness? PP: It just makes sense to me. PG: You think it’s true? PP: Yeah. —————————————— @philipthrift -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/d067fc13-4b61-42bb-b46a-c51479e39d3f%40googlegroups.com.
