dmb said:
The MOQ says that even subatomic particles can express preferences.... and
greater and greater degrees of consciousness unfold throughout the whole
evolutionary process.
Dave T replied:
So what you are proposing as your theory of reality is that quarks are
conscious? What next? Equal rights for quarks? What about gay quarks getting
married?
dmb says:
No, Dave. That is NOT what I'm saying. The only thing you've done in this
response is prop up the same ridiculous straw man that Krimel uses.
Krimel's Straw man #3) atoms are decision makers
Your ongoing defense of Pirsig you have consistently defended his use of
"preference" as an alternative to "cause".
dmb's actual position #3)
You anthropomorphize the behavior of inorganic patterns in a way that Pirsig
would never endorse and neither would anyone else. The actual idea is that it
makes more sense to think of the "laws" of physics in a less mechanistic way.
And of course with the way the field is these days, the probability of needing
a quantum leap in re-conceptualizing these "laws" is very high.
This is also the view that Chalmers entertains and it is the view that James
arrived at, by the way. It's called panpsychism. Here's a brief description
from Weaki:
Panpsychism, in philosophy, is either the view that all parts of matter involve
mind, or the more holistic view that the whole Universe is an organism that
possesses a mind (see pandeism, pantheism, panentheism and cosmic
consciousness). It is thus a stronger and more ambitious view than animism or
hylozoism, which holds only that all things are alive. This is not to say that
panpsychism believes that all matter is alive or even conscious but rather that
the constituent parts of matter are composed of some form of mind and are
sentient.
Panpsychism claims that everything is sentient and that there are either many
separate minds, or one single mind that unites everything that is. The concept
of the unconscious, made popular by the psychoanalysts, made possible a variant
of panpsychism that denies consciousness from some entities while still
asserting the ubiquity of mind.
Panexperientialism, as espoused by Alfred North Whitehead, is a less bold
variation, which credits all entities with phenomenal consciousness but not
with cognition, and therefore not necessarily with fully-fledged minds.
Panprotoexperientialism is a more cautious variation still, which credits all
entities with non-physical properties that are precursors to phenomenal
consciousness (or phenomenal consciousness in a latent, undeveloped form) but
not with cognition itself, or with conscious awareness.
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