http://thebaffler.com/past/whats_the_point_if_we_cant_have_fun
[Ian] > What was the writer's point? For MD the important point was the two types of explanations of "how life might emerge from dead matter or how conscious beings might evolve from microbes...The first consists of what’s called emergentism...the second position, usually called panpsychism or panexperientialism, agrees that all this may be true but argues that emergence is not enough. As British philosopher Galen Strawson recently put it, to imagine that one can travel from insensate matter to a being capable of discussing the existence of insensate matter in a mere two jumps is simply to make emergence do too much work. Something has to be there already, on every level of material existence, even that of subatomic particles—something, however minimal and embryonic, that does some of the things we are used to thinking of life (and even mind) as doing—in order for that something to be organized on more and more complex levels to eventually produce self-conscious beings. That “something” might be very minimal indeed: some very rudimentary sense of responsiveness to one’s environment, something like anticipation, something like memory. However rudimentary, it would have to exist for self-organizing systems like atoms or molecules to self-organize in the first place." [Yes, Galen Strawson, the same philosopher who gave the negative review of ZMM.] Craig 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
