But that is not a dichotomy as it is one thing with two mutually exclusive properties. A dichotomy would be like location~momentum complementarity where matter has both irreducibly, but being constrained in one direction has material consequences for its partner property.

You are trying to say instead that matter has to have just one or the other in absolute fashion. Either it is universally alive or it is universally dead. And because we at least are alive, we can't then believe that the rest of existence can be dead. That is the panpsychic argument in a nutshell.

So technically, you are arguing by antinomy. You are insisting that the law of the excluded middle applies. That's different from a metaphysical dichotomy where the polar extremes become the complementary limits of existence.

If there is mind and there is matter, then neither themselves "really exist". All things could only tend towards one or other extreme. Neither aliveness nor deadness could be universal states in themselves. It is only their relativity that is present and real in the world.

And to make sense of that, we would have to be able to see the connection which makes that sound right. Which is pretty much the point of Peircean semiotics.

You can't arrive at a sensible pan-istic tale via a LEM argument. That is designed for reasoning about sets of absolute particulars, not metaphysical generalities. Before a binary logic of the either/or, we must begin with a justification of how the fact of binary possibility - pairs of opposing limits - could even arise within this one world that is Being. That is the critical step that you are missing and which panpsychism is set up to skirt.

I was referring to a dichotomy of views. Apparently you haven't noticed this:

Must the reality be one or the other; or would that apply only to our models? — Janus

I was referring to a dichotomy of views. Apparently you haven't noticed this: — Janus

Sure, but the dichotomous alternative to panpsychism is panzombieism or pandeadism. — Janus

So, the alternative scenarios (ignoring dualistic substance ontologies) as they are usually conceived are;

matter is alive and intelligent

matter is dead — Janus

Sure, you talked about dichotomies in terms of both epistemology and ontology. So there is the dichotomy between the model and the reality. And the model of the reality can be of the dichotomies that form reality. And then - the Peircean finale - the dichotomy of model and reality is essentially the semiotic dichotomy that is also the dichotomy that constructs reality.

So it is all connected and intertwined.

But I was addressing the form of your particular ontic claim here - that reality is composed of a substance that is either intrinsically alive/aware or, instead, dead/inert ... whatever that could truly mean.

I'm still waiting for a response on that. Saying that our ontologies are just themselves alternative views is a different issue.

Or rather, what I was saying was you were adopting an epistemology that relies on LEM-derived antinomies. A metaphysical dichotomy has a different dialectical logic. So now we are dealing with the meta-dichotomy of your essentially reductionist approach - a reduction of dualisms to monads - vs my essentially holist approach, where there is the opposite of an expansion towards a triadic or hierarchical systems model in play.

And elsewhere I have agreed that reductionism vs holism is a genuine epistemic dichotomy. They are the asymmetricisation of each other. They are complementary modes of inquiry in most ways. Each goes to its own extreme - one towards logical atomism, the other towards absolute contextuality.

But that is a sophisticated position to arrive at. And panpsychism is the very opposite of a sophisticated position. Which is what would make panzombieism or pandeadism just straw men, not serious alternative ontologies.

Time for a quick recap. I started with an analogy of brain to mirror, and mind to reflected virtual image, thereby suggesting that looking for mind in the substance of brain is a bit like looking for the reflected image behind the mirror. Doomed to disappointment, that is. — unenlightened

You admit that there is a brain. Whose brain?
You admit that there is a mind. Whose mind? Where is it relative to other minds?

As I have said before, there is no image in the mirror when no one is looking at the mirror. There is just a reflective surface reflecting light. The image is only in the mind - formed as a representation of the reflected light. The image is the representation.

But here's a problem; I am not present to you. Everything I present to you in the previous paragraph is not me, but the model of me that forms part of the model of the world I am offering for you to use as you wish or chuck in the bin. So I am inscribing on this model, 'the model is not the world, the word is not the thing, I am not my post'. Lest I be accused of nonsense. — unenlightened

But the model is part of you. No one is saying that you are a post. You are a human being writing a post. Human beings have brains/minds. Brains are the model/representation of minds.

But I was addressing the form of your particular ontic claim here - that reality is composed of a substance that is either intrinsically alive/aware or, instead, dead/inert ... whatever that could truly mean. — apokrisis

But I wasn't making that claim; I was just saying that the alternate views which constitute eliminative materialism (panzombieism or pandeadism) and some form of panpsychism form a dichotomy insofar as they each claim something opposite to the other, namely ultimate deadness or ultimate aliveness, about the substance of reality.

I haven't claimed that either one of those must be the ontological case (although of course adherents of either standpoint may claim ontological status for their respective view). Rather I was making a poinnt that people often think that either one or the other must really (meaning independently of us and our ontological models) be the case, that there either must be a consciousness or living intelligence at the heart or of matter or not; and I am questioning the coherence of that very 'either/ or'.

And reading over your post before last, it seems that you are agreeing, not disagreeing, with me.

So do you reject panpsychism as not even a coherent theory? Can we be clear on that.

I would say that as a mere model, just as its opposite, eliminative materialism it is coherent. It is when either is claimed to be the absolute ontological truth that the incoherence comes in.

So either nothing is mindful or everything is mindful. And those two options exhaust the choices?

Well nope.

If instead you are saying panpsychism and eliminative materialism are pretty equivalent in their degree of essential incoherency, then maybe yes. :)

If instead you are saying panpsychism and eliminative materialism are pretty equivalent in their degree of essential incoherency, then maybe yes — apokrisis

Well that's what I am saying anyway, because what I want to mean by 'consciousness', whatever else I want to say about it, is that it is something that I see in myself when I am awake, and definitely don't see when I am on the operating table, thank anaesthetics, and see in other people and to varying degrees in animals, and not at all in rocks and plastic spoons.

Accordingly, I think I have only two options left; either some version of incarnation of soul from a spiritual realm, or some version of emergence from particular structures of matter and energy - so far at least, universally structures of living matter. The theory of evolution seems to speak for the latter option, but my approach here is to leave that question open for the moment, and just look at what I can see and anyone can see, and try to describe it as carefully as I can.

No, I'm just saying that either, as mere models, are coherently thinkable.

What is not coherently thinkable is how they or any other model could be the case beyond their status as mere model.

Accordingly, I think I have only two options left; either some version of incarnation of soul from a spiritual realm, or some version of emergence from particular structures of matter and energy - so far at least, universally structures of living matter. — unenlightened

This is the either/or fallacy. There are more options. You are just ignoring them because they don't fit the presumptions you've made in this thread.

The theory of evolution seems to speak for the latter option, but my approach here is to leave that question open for the moment, and just look at what I can see and anyone can see, and try to describe it as carefully as I can. — unenlightened

Right. So we ignore certain facts in order to leave open a question that shouldn't be asked in the first place because it is nonsensical.

This is the either/or fallacy. There are more options. You are just ignoring them because they don't fit the presumptions you've made in this thread. — Harry Hindu

Feel free to bring them up and I'll consider them.

Well that's what I am saying anyway, because what I want to mean by 'consciousness', whatever else I want to say about it, is that it is something that I see in myself when I am awake, and definitely don't see when I am on the operating table, thank anaesthetics, and see in other people and to varying degrees in animals, and not at all in rocks and plastic spoons. — unenlightened

Do you notice a difference between what you "see" as consciousness within your self, and what you "see" as consciousness within others? How would you account for this difference? Some people might say that it is a difference in perspective. But what does that mean, other than that the medium between you is doing something weird, like when you look in the mirror, and the features on your right side look like they are on your left side, the mirror is doing something weird? How does the medium create such a difference of perspective?

Do you notice a difference between what you "see" as consciousness within your self, and what you "see" as consciousness within others? — Metaphysician Undercover

When I did my first aid course, more or less the first thing you are taught to do is to establish whether the casualty is conscious or unconscious. First you talk to them, and if there is no response you shake them and almost shout, and if there is still no response you pinch their ear hard enough to hurt. And if there is still no response, you take them to be unconscious. There are rare exceptional cases where someone might be conscious in just this sense of being responsive to stimuli, but paralysed such that their response is blocked and ineffective. In such 'locked in' cases it is very hard to tell. But even in these cases I would say, to be conscious consists, in being responsive - brain is responsive even if muscles are not. So I don't see that my own case is any different at all.

But you probably won't like this response, because you used the word 'within', and responses are not generally confined to 'within'.

So I don't see that my own case is any different at all. — unenlightened

Why would you have to check yourself for responsiveness? Would you yell at yourself? Would you pinch your own ear? Don't you determine your own responsiveness in a way completely different from the way that you determine another's responsiveness?

Obviously not, because to check is already to be responding; so I never need to check. The nearest I can get to that is that I occasionally suffer from sleep paralysis; typically, I will try to get out of bed to piss and be unable to move, and after a while, it wears off and I can get up. And afterwards, I find it hard to say whether I was conscious or dreaming. If someone else was there watching, I don't know what they would see - it hasn't happened.

I will sometimes yell at myself, or pinch myself to stay awake when I'm driving. But I think this is an indication of the inversion which is created by the mirror of consciousness. I apprehend my own consciousness in a way different from the way I apprehend another's. I might yell at another to wake them up, but I yell at myself to keep myself awake.

I apprehend my own consciousness in a way different from the way I apprehend another's. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well I have described how I apprehend another's consciousness. Can you describe how you apprehend your own otherwise than by your responsiveness?

Yes, I think it's very near to the exact opposite of responsiveness, meditation. I have to free myself from all interferences, which might demand responsiveness, and reflect within. That is how I apprehend my own consciousness.

Well it's possible we are talking about different things, or that it is somehow the same thing seen from the other side. You haven't really said what it is other than not responsiveness. But I understand it is difficult; I wonder if it is something then that is in someway covered over, swamped, by the business of responding - a space - as it were - that is filled by responding but is there as a space when one is quiet? Am I somewhere near?

Take the example you gave, telling us to imagine a poplar tree by the lake. I would classify this action of yours as initiative rather than responsive. I perceive you starting this thread as an initiative rather than as a response.

It may be the case that you perceive these conscious actions as responses rather than as initiatives, but I'm not privy to this information, which makes you view the op as responsive rather than as initiative.

Anyway, that's what I see about consciousness which makes it other than responsiveness, that it initiates things. Isn't that the difference between the free will perspective and the determinist perspective, one looks at consciousness as initiative, the other as responsive?

So these thoughts appear to have come from my brain, but are actually more or less distorted reflections of the world... — unenlightened

I look at thoughts as creations of the brain, not as reflections of the world.

In the meantime, I still think that responsiveness is a component at least of anything I want to dignify with the term 'conscious'. This is one of those places where I think ad hominem is a legitimate focus of argument, so I will with some hesitation put forth the hypothesis that to participate in a discussion here is to subject oneself to something of a Turing test by one's interlocutors, and one of the ways I personally mark these on-going tests to distinguish a bare pass from a distinction as it were, by how responsive they are. Some posters seem to trot out the same responses over and over as if, like modbot, they are triggered by a word or a phrase. Others manage to convince me that they have read the whole post and created a new response that relates to that post.

This exemplifies the distinction between responding, and what I will call 'reacting'; or sometimes I might call it 'overreacting'.

Anyway I'm trying to clarify a bit without being too formal at this stage, what it takes to be responsive, and again a certain presence is a feature - a here and now aspect that is particular to the occasion. Having said that, the ignore button is also a response, somewhat generic, but particular to a poster, unless it becomes a habit. Are you still awake at the back there?

I mentioned time a long time back, and I think next post or soon, anyway, I'll try and go into that a bit more, but I see consciousness as always and only present.

Edit:

Take the example you gave, telling us to imagine a poplar tree by the lake. I would classify this action of yours as initiative rather than responsive. I perceive you starting this thread as an initiative rather than as a response.

It may be the case that you perceive these conscious actions as responses rather than as initiatives, but I'm not privy to this information, which makes you view the op as responsive rather than as initiative. — Metaphysician Undercover

Ah, I think I understand your point and hopefully I have at least started to answer it above. If I push a non-conscious vase off the mantelpiece, it reacts by falling onto the hearth, and probably breaking. By contrast, if I push the cat off the mantlepiece, it responds, turning itself in midair and landing on its feet, and then stalking off indignantly. A response includes an element of initiative, as you put it, or as I put it earlier an element of imagination. So my op is hopefully a creative response to various bits and pieces that I have come across and most of the responses at least have been similarly creative, at the same time as they are relevant to the op. Hopefully, we are not reciting dogma to each other but thinking about what has been said and moving, if we are lucky, towards a new conception of things. So it is not responses rather than initiatives, but responses are initiatives in relation to what has gone before, (because there is no limit to the possible responses) and thoughts are indeed creations of brains, but also reflections/models of the world.

I'm not sure if this relates to Pierce at all, but I see consciousness as in the first place a response to the immediacy of sensation - a connection with the world, but that response is informed, modified, extended, liberated into creativity, by memory and thought.

I was considering drawing a diagram, but decided to manage without.

I locate consciousness in the present; it is presence, it is the now. I can describe the contents from the senses, the computer is on my lap, a cup of coffee steaming to the right, the armchair is red, and I am typing with two fingers. Also, the contents are memories, that I just made the coffee, that I made a post yesterday, and models, that if I scroll up I can read it, that I am intending to continue an exploration in this thread.

This gives rise quite naturally to the idea of a distinction between internal and external; sight, sound, touch present to consciousness the external world, and memory, thought, modelling, present the internal world. Now it is fairly uncontroversial to say that the external world - the coffee, the armchair, etc is not conscious, not the location of awareness, but only the content, the provocation.

It is rather more radical though to claim that the internal world, memories, models, thoughts, are not conscious either, but are also only more contents and provocations. I mentioned earlier that model time is not real time. You can probably replay the events of yesterday in a few minutes at most, and re-present the past to consciousness. Re-membering, re-presenting is now, all of it is present, or else it is absent. Memories might be 'there' in the brain, just as there is crap behind the sofa that I cannot see, but these things are not 'here' in consciousness.

And then, there is action. And let's include inaction, let's include internal action - building a new model, meditating, calculating, exploring an idea. This internal action goes on while I am away from the computer, as well as while I am typing. Consciousness acts in the world, and also in the brain.

Again, the way I am describing things sounds a bit like inputs and outputs, and it is a bit misleading. Seeing the coffee cup is an action and drinking the coffee is a sensation, there are not really inputs and outputs that are different kinds, but everything is both and neither, everything is integral, in the same way that a response integrates the creative initiative with what is already there as provocation.

Again, the way I am describing things sounds a bit like inputs and outputs, and it is a bit misleading. Seeing the coffee cup is an action and drinking the coffee is a sensation, there are not really inputs and outputs that are different kinds, but everything is both and neither, everything is integral, in the same way that a response integrates the creative initiative with what is already there as provocation. — unenlightened

Good stuff.

I wonder if it sounds like inputs/outputs just because we are accustomed to that way of thinking. I agree that it is both and neither, though. It's not as if I don't react or invent because of the world about me, but it's also not as if I am a puppet to the world about me too. At least as far as consciousness is concerned.

But it may sound as if we are automatons just merely by the way we are trained to think.

***

I sort of wonder which way you're leaning. Nothing is conscious or everything is. Or there is this thing called consciousness and there is also the world.

I member, I present, I re-member, I re-present. All that is now, in the here and now. They are kinds of actions, though maybe a bit different from wielding a hammer.

Is consciousness the sort of thing (I hate to use the word "thing", but alas, English) which acts whether I am moving bodily or no? Just a thought.

I sort of wonder which way you're leaning. Nothing is conscious or everything is. Or there is this thing called consciousness and there is also the world. — Moliere

Well so far, I cannot eliminate the possibility of a full-blown spirit/matter dualism, but it seems like an unfruitful model in which the spiritual is either invented or left blank. Eliminativism and panpsychism I have also ruled out as not explaining the thing that wants explaining, that I am not a rock. So until @Harry Hindu or someone else sets forth the alternatives that I haven't thought of, I am left with emergentism, but emergence from "brainy-bodies-in-environments". When a blind man feels his way with a stick, his consciousness is in the curb he feels, at the end of the stick, in the hand holding the stick, in the brain modelling the environment, and the feet propelling him and confirming his model. When an earthbound astronomer uses the Hubble telescope his consciousness is amongst the stars just as much as it is in his head. Or to put it better - consciousness is not located, because it is virtual.

But here is one consideration that might move one in the direction of dualist woo. Physics seems to have no account of the uniqueness of now. It treats time as a dimension which is given direction by entropy, but does not privilege any place on the dimension as the present. Consciousness does. Physics has the film 'in the can', but consciousness is watching and acting in that same film. Perhaps physics is missing something.

Perhaps physics is missing something. — unenlightened

David Chalmers is famous for having made that suggestion.

A response includes an element of initiative, as you put it, or as I put it earlier an element of imagination. So my op is hopefully a creative response to various bits and pieces that I have come across and most of the responses at least have been similarly creative, at the same time as they are relevant to the op. — unenlightened

OK, so conscious activity is a combination of these two elements, reaction, and creation. Therefore I conclude that you are describing consciousness in terms of what it does, what it is doing. It is reacting and it is creating, in a way which combines these two elements. My opinion is that there is a very real need to separate these two, in principle, so that we can proceed to separate them in practise, when we make judgements concerning what consciousness is doing.

Look at the mirror. Notice that the features on the right side of your body appear to be on the left side of your body, and vise versa. The mirror is doing something weird. But we don't say that the mirror is making a mistake; nor do we say that the mirror is "wrong". We appeal to the physicists who use fancy terms like "chirality", and "higher dimensions", to explain exactly what the mirror is "doing". So it turns out that despite the fact that the mirror appears to be doing something weird, it is not really doing anything wrong, it's actually doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing.

Now look what happens when human consciousness "models" the world. We cannot say that the model is a "reflection", because human consciousness has that creative element which the mirror does not have. Because that creative element is there in human consciousness, and manifests within the model, we can judge the model as right or wrong. So when you ask us to imagine a poplar tree by the lake, and someone doesn't know what a poplar tree looks like, and imagines a birch tree instead, that's creativity, and we can judge creativity saying that the person is "wrong" in that model. That element of creativity within consciousness allows us to look at what the conscious person is doing, and judge those doings as right and wrong.

It is rather more radical though to claim that the internal world, memories, models, thoughts, are not conscious either, but are also only more contents and provocations. I mentioned earlier that model time is not real time. You can probably replay the events of yesterday in a few minutes at most, and re-present the past to consciousness. Re-membering, re-presenting is now, all of it is present, or else it is absent. Memories might be 'there' in the brain, just as there is crap behind the sofa that I cannot see, but these things are not 'here' in consciousness. — unenlightened

Will you allow me to separate the contents here from the "agent"? When I say "agent", I mean it in the most general sense possible, like the grammatical subject, the thing which is active, doing something. So the mirror is an agent in the sense that it is doing something, making a reflection. What I am asking, is that when you separate the contents from the consciousness, as you do here, do you still maintain that it is the consciousness which is acting, "doing"? That way we still maintain the capacity to judge the actions as wrong and right.

I locate consciousness in the present; it is presence, it is the now. I can describe the contents from the senses, the computer is on my lap, a cup of coffee steaming to the right, the armchair is red, and I am typing with two fingers. Also, the contents are memories, that I just made the coffee, that I made a post yesterday, and models, that if I scroll up I can read it, that I am intending to continue an exploration in this thread. — unenlightened

What if I say your model of consciousness is wrong? There is no such thing as the present, so it is impossible that consciousness is located in the present. The present is an imaginary division which separates the temporal duration of the past from the temporal duration of the future. This is just an artificial boundary, a point which separates two contiguous durations of time, like "noon" separates morning from afternoon. But there could be absolutely nothing there, so it's impossible that consciousness is there.

So until Harry Hindu or someone else sets forth the alternatives that I haven't thought of, I am left with emergentism, but emergence from "brainy-bodies-in-environments". — unenlightened

Physics has the film 'in the can', but consciousness is watching and acting in that same film. Perhaps physics is missing something. — unenlightened

Maybe this is an issue of preaching to the choir... but I definitely feel that even all of science, from physics on up, is missing something. And I say that as a used-to-be scientific realist materialist type guy.

But I will speak against emergence, too. Maybe because of my history as a used-to-be, but I think I have arguments too. The problem with emergence, from my perspective, is that it suffers from all the same arguments against dualism. Emergence is a kind of answer to the main question of dualism, "How do these two substances relate?" -- but without a real answer other than "Well, this one makes the other one somehow". Maybe I'm being a bit of a pedant, but at this point at least I feel that's not too far off, when you strip away the linguistic maneuvers

To be honest I have flirted with dualism in the past -- both property and substance dualism -- but now-a-days I feel a real ignorance, and a sort of wonder about the problem of consciousness. I don't feel that my thoughts obstruct the facts anymore. But I don't know what to make of it all. I guess that's where I'm at on the problem of consciousness -- just in-between and not quite committed.

What if I say your model of consciousness is wrong? There is no such thing as the present, so it is impossible that consciousness is located in the present. The present is an imaginary division which separates the temporal duration of the past from the temporal duration of the future. This is just an artificial boundary, a point which separates two contiguous durations of time, like "noon" separates morning from afternoon. But there could be absolutely nothing there, so it's impossible that consciousness is there. — Metaphysician Undercover

Then I would be anxious to hear your account.

Emergence is a kind of answer to the main question of dualism, "How do these two substances relate?" --but without a real answer other than "Well, this one makes the other one somehow" — Moliere

Well there is potential for it to be more than complete hand-waving; we understand how solidity and liquidity emerge from the mass behaviours of molecules under certain conditions, and we know not to look inside molecules or atoms for these properties, but rather to their relations to each other. So a theory of emergence would likewise tend to suggest that it is relations between brains, bodies, and conditions as I would have it, or between neurons as neuroscience has it, from which consciousness arises.

So until Harry Hindu or someone else sets forth the alternatives that I haven't thought of... — unenlightened

Re-read my posts.