Ian said to dmb:
.., all you were really doing was holding up panpsychism as valid, whatever
Birch's other defects.
dmb says:
Right. I'd never heard of the guy until Platt posted his name and the validity
of panpsychism certainly does hinge on Birch. It doesn't hinge on Chalmers
either. Obviously, I'd be far more interested in the panpsychism of Pierce,
James, Dewey and Pirsig before anyone else's. This is MOQ discuss, after all.
Ian said:
I think somewhere at root here you are trying to make a point about some kind
of physical reductionism - and you see "emergence" as a word signalling that
error - greedy reductionism as Dennett would say. The kind of reductionism that
points out the physical explanations of material processes as the source of
emergence, as if that explains all the bio-socio-intellectual patterns and
processes too. (I take it as a given the MoQ tells us to look at patterns of
value in all levels up to the situation in question.)
dmb says:
Yes and no. Yes, reductionism is the problem with Krimel's view and I've been
saying that for a very long time. I don't have a problem with emergence,
however, and I don't think it signals reductionism. Birch's point was that it's
hard to see how mind can emerge from no-mind but if emergence is understood
within a panpsychic view, then it's just a matter of complexity emerging out of
simplicity. If mind and matter are two aspects of everything from the bottom
up, then full blown reflective self-consciousness has not emerged from no-mind.
It just means that mind has been evolving from the very beginning and it was
never not there. So emergence and panpsychism can go quite nicely together.
But yes, it is reductionism that is the problem. Chalmers is convinced that
some kind of non-reductionistic answer to the hard problem of consciousness and
that it will never, in principle, be explainable in physical terms. His
critique of physicalism is an attack on reductionism.
I don't know what the difference is between reductionism and greedy
reductionism, but my hunch is that Dennett is defending his own reductionism
with that distinction. Care to explain?
Moq_Discuss mailing list
Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
Archives:
http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
http://moq.org/md/archives.html
