Well, I suppose I deduced

parts are conscious because a whole is, nor that wholes are conscious because their parts are — bert1

from the original claim of panpsychists which is that everything has a soul/mind. Parts are things, so, they have souls/minds but the whole the parts make up is also a thing and so must have a soul/mind. Both wholes and parts are things and so, both must have souls.

However, there's a clear distinction - organizationally (is that a word?) - between wholes and parts and that distinction is important for the existence of the fallacy of composition/division - some things true of parts may not be true of wholes and vice versa. An argument becomes necessary to prove that the fallacy of division (if you're taking a top-down approach) or the fallacy of composition (if you're going for a bottom-up approach) isn't being committed.

The possibility of the fallacies mentioned being committed becomes real once you look at the paradox I mentioned earlier. Take a piece of wood - it's a thing, so, has a soul/mind. Repeatedly break it into two equal halves and with each such procedure, the number of souls should double. Do this n times and you should have in your hands 2^n pieces each with its own soul/mind.

Now ask how many souls/minds does the original piece of wood have? You would have to say, as per the panpsychists' claim that everything has a soul/mind, that the original piece of wood has both 2^n souls/minds (the 2^n parts) AND 1 soul (the original piece of wood as a whole) and that's a contradiction. The only way out of this contradiction is to draw a distinction between parts and wholes but when you do that the specter of the composition/division fallacy looms overhead like the sword of Damocles.

Do you know what a contemporary panpsychist would say about selfhood? If there are tiny consciousness units or vast waves of it, where is knowledge of self? Is selfhood emergent? Or is it in the tiny bits? — frank

I'm not very well read at the moment, sorry. I haven't kept up that well with developments.

There are two camps (among others) among panpsychists IIRC. One camp are the micropsychists (or smallists) who think that there is consciousness everywhere there is matter, because all matter at the level of fundamental particles possess a unitary consciousness. So quarks and electrons and leptons or whatever are conscious. So these panpsychists don't think that literally everything is conscious, just that consciousness is everywhere because tiny things are everywhere. At exactly which points in the complexification of matter consciousness arises again as a unitary mind (i.e. a self, a centre of experience) I'm not sure about. Is it at the level of atom? The organic molecule? The cell? The neuron? The brain? Or what? Smallism seems doomed to arbitrariness to me, and very vulnerable to all the usual objections: How do experiences 'sum'? This is still a kind of emergence so why not just have emergence from non-conscious stuff? How do we avoid the arbitrariness? No doubts smallists have their answers, but one way out of this is to drop smallism and opt for....

...Cosmopsychism, which could be called 'biggism' I suppose. This says we start with the universe as a whole as the primarily conscious entity. I'm not sure about that either, although I prefer it to smallism. I might be a cosmopsychist, I'm not sure. Need to read up about it. There is the possibility here of making a fallacy of division (the parts are conscious because the whole is) as @TheMadFool will be alert to. But it's likely that other arguments are made which do not fall foul of that.

For a theory of what makes a 'self' or private unitary centre of consciousness is a very interesting question and I don't know the answer to it. However we could plug in various functionalist theories of consciousness here, but rebranding them not as theories of consciousness, but theories of the self. For example, the Integrated Information Theory of consciousness (Tononi and Koch) is a really interesting idea, except it is wrong because it is a functionalist reductionist theory of consciousness. It says consciousness and integrated information are one and the same thing, which is just wrong. Consciousness is consciousness and integrated information is integrated information. Instead it could be much more profitably rebranded as a theory of the self. That is to say, any entity that integrates information is an individual. Everything (however arbitrarily defined) integrates at least 1 bit of information (I'm winging it here - it's ages since I read the papers) so everything is a centre of consciousness. However experiences start to get interesting when more than 1 bit of information is integrated. And when we come to brains, which integrate large amounts of information, we get the rich conscious lives we currently have. I think it's an interesting possibility.

In general I think there is a massive confusion which dogs both philosophy and science, the confusion between consciousness and identity. For example, when people take an anaesthetic, it is said they have lost consciousness, which is fine for everyday talk of the kind that @Banno likes. But if we take this a little more carefully, we might ask "What exactly is lost? Could it be identity that is disrupted, rather than a loss of consciousness? Experientially, for the person, wouldn't those two things be the same?" On one, identity remains, but consciousness is lost; Asil has no experience. The other, consciousness remains, but identity is lost; Asil has no experiences because Asil, defined as a functional unity, no longer exists; instead, lower level systems which do retain (complex or simple) functional unity are the ones having experiences. When Asil wakes up, what has happened? Has her consciousness rebooted? Or has her identity rebooted? It's hard to tell experimentally. But we tend to assume it is consciousness that has rebooted, but this is not a safe assumption. I think it's much more likely that identity is disrupted.

You would have to say, as per the panpsychists' claim that everything has a soul/mind, that the original piece of wood has both 2^n souls/minds (the 2^n parts) AND 1 soul (the original piece of wood as a whole) and that's a contradiction. — TheMadFool

Not all panpsychists claim that everything has a mind, some claim only that where there is anything, there is consciousness also, i.e. the smallists mentioned above.

However you successfully target my panpsychism, because I do think that everything, however defined, is individually conscious. I see no contradiction in holding that the plank as a whole has a mind, and also that, say, individual molecules in the plank also have their own minds.

No problem. I had some ideas that needed a sounding board; I suppose you had similar intentions. I'll leave the discussion now, much wiser than I was when I joined in. Thanks. Good day.

Sure but on the macro level the uncertainty principle becomes irrelevant so prediction should still be possible as far as I know. — khaled

It's highly relevant to the claim that 'perfect knowledge of the configuration of atoms will reveal a complete explanation of the nature of consciousness'.

You have to explain *why* science cannot explain, which means describing its properties such that they aren't amenable to scientific modelling. — Kenosha Kid

David Chalmers does that in 'facing up to the hard problem', to wit:

The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience. — David Chalmers

The eliminativist claims that it is possible in principle to provide an account of the nature of experience in third-person terms, continuous with the other sciences; in other words, the first-person sense of experience can be eliminated without loosing anything essential to it. But what Chalmers is saying is that the first-person aspect of experience can never be explained in third-person terms as a matter of principle. So the property of the 'being the subject of experience' is not amenable to scientific modelling.

...Cosmopsychism, which could be called 'biggism' I suppose. This says we start with the universe as a whole as the primarily conscious entity. — bert1

Tantalising hint from ancient philosophy:

God, according to the Stoics, "did not make the world as an artisan does his work, but it is by wholly penetrating all matter that He is the demiurge of the universe" (Galen, "De qual. incorp." in "Fr. Stoic.", ed. von Arnim, II, 6); He penetrates the world "as honey does the honeycomb" (Tertullian, "Adv. Hermogenem", 44), this God so intimately mingled with the world is fire or ignited air; inasmuch as He is the principle controlling the universe, He is called Logos; and inasmuch as He is the germ from which all else develops, He is called the seminal Logos (logos spermatikos). This Logos is at the same time a force and a law, an irresistible force which bears along the entire world and all creatures to a common end, an inevitable and holy law from which nothing can withdraw itself, and which every reasonable man should follow willingly (Cleanthus, "Hymn to Zeus" in "Fr. Stoic." I, 527-cf. 537). — New Advent Encyclopedia

There is some similarity with the Hindu conception of ātman:

Ātman, (Sanskrit: “self,” “breath”) one of the most basic concepts in Hinduism, the universal self, identical with the eternal core of the personality that after death either transmigrates to a new life or attains release (moksha) from the bonds of existence. While in the early Vedas it occurred mostly as a reflexive pronoun meaning “oneself,” in the later Upanishads (speculative commentaries on the Vedas) it comes more and more to the fore as a philosophical topic. Atman is that which makes the other organs and faculties function and for which indeed they function; it also underlies all the activities of a person, as brahman (the Absolute) underlies the workings of the universe. Ātman is a reflection of the universal Brahman, with which it can commune or even attain union. — Encyclopedia Brittanica

(Note this concept that is denied by Buddhists.)

Yes but maybe it can’t be ascertainable for most cases. — khaled

That suffices. The redness of the ball is not ascertained in pitch darkness.

Incorrect. Ascribing it says something. — khaled

About the ascriber, maybe. If I say the red ball has a soul (a rubber soul, natch) but you can't do anything that proves or disproves it even in principle, or some new property that interacts with nothing in the universe, even other things having that property, it would be foolish to believe me.

You’re starting as if there is this word “consciousness” that means nothing that we then ascribe meaning to by specifying some capacity or other. But I would say that consciousness already has a well defined meaning. It is whether or not something can have experiences. — khaled

Yes, on a thread in which people cannot agree as to whether an atom has consciousness or even whether a person has it. A strange place to insist it's all very well defined.

As for your definition, it simply defers it's vagueness. What do you mean by 'have experiences'? Do you mean it as Pfhorrest's conception of consciousness would have it, wherein an experience would simply be a response to a change in the environment, such as a charged particle in a changing electric field? Or do you mean it in it's normal sense of animals that are not only conscious of, say, a red ball, but aware that they are conscious of it? Or something in between?

Interesting. Thanks!

Which assumes that thinking is ethereal, i.e. the mind is a closed system and anything that goes on inside it is completely transparent to outside interrogation. — Kenosha Kid

I don’t use mind with respect to thinking, mind being merely a logical placeholder having no pure functionality of its own except to arbitrarily terminate infinite regress. I will admit that pure reason is an individuated closed system and by association, is inaccessible to general external inquiry. We can talk of it post hoc, but not concurrent with it.
————————

what neuroscience sees is the opposite: we can see you think. — Kenosha Kid

No, we do not; what is seen, is a mechanical representation of my thinking. Strap a machine to my head, watch me tie my shoe. You see traces, graphs, lit sequences......I see my shoe being tied. Watch me repeatedly, set a norm, and you can subsequently see a representation of my intent to mis-tie my shoe, while I, on the other hand, will see a shoe already mis-tied.

What remains is a difficult classification problem: how we identify a particular neurological activity with a particular mental activity. — Kenosha Kid

Difficult indeed. And with a neural connectivity average of 12.9 x 10^8/mm3**, the physical process of burrowing down to specific network paths in order to correlate them to specific cognitive manifestations, may very well destroy that path.
**Alonso-Nanclares, et. al., Department of Anatomy/Compared Pathological Anatomy, Madrid, 2008)
——————-

.....no science is at all possible that has no relevant thought antecedent to it, of which consciousness itself is an integral member.
— Mww

What is the claim here, that since thinking involves consciousness, we cannot start to think about consciousness? It simply doesn't follow. — Kenosha Kid

It doesn’t follow because it’s no where near what I said.

The claim is scientific study of anything at all, necessarily presupposes both the empirical object to which it is directed, or at least its predictable possibility, and the rational means for its accomplishment. In order for science to study consciousness, it must reify it, or, which is the same thing, turn it into a phenomenon, the misplaced concreteness fallacy of which metaphysical study has no guilt. I understand science cannot abide the “fictions” of which metaphysics inevitably is guilty, but still, if we are careful in our construction of them then we have something to talk about in pure conceptual form, rather than a hodge-podge of conversational idioms.

Now don’t get me wrong. Science is the second most valuable paradigm in human life, right after the human himself.

Oh...forgot: in what sense do you say metaphysics is doomed?

He penetrates the world "as honey does the honeycomb" (Tertullian, "Adv. Hermogenem", 44), this God so intimately mingled with the world is fire or ignited air; inasmuch as He is the principle controlling the universe, He is called Logos; and inasmuch as He is the germ from which all else develops, He is called the seminal Logos (logos spermatikos). — New Advent Encyclopedia

I like this bit. Wanking should be appreciated more for its cosmic significance.

Interesting. Thanks! — frank

You're every welcome, thanks for asking.

No problem. I had some ideas that needed a sounding board; I suppose you had similar intentions. I'll leave the discussion now, much wiser than I was when I joined in. Thanks. Good day. — TheMadFool

I'll be especially on the lookout for fallacies of composition and division now.

...Cosmopsychism, which could be called 'biggism' I suppose. This says we start with the universe as a whole as the primarily conscious entity. — bert1
Tantalising hint from ancient philosophy:
"He penetrates the world "as honey does the honeycomb" (Tertullian, "Adv. Hermogenem", 44), this God so intimately mingled with the world is fire or ignited air; inasmuch as He is the principle controlling the universe, He is called Logos; and inasmuch as He is the germ from which all else develops, He is called the seminal Logos (logos spermatikos)." — Wayfarer

The Stoic worldview quoted above is similar to my own Enformationism thesis, which is based on modern science, rather than ancient philosophical speculations. So, I use mundane metaphors from Quantum Physics and Information Theory instead of poetic notions of honeycombs permeated with the staff-of-life for bees.

I try to avoid the misleading term Panpsychism, due to its implication that bees and atoms are conscious in a manner similar to human awareness. This may sound anthro-centric to some, but human-self-consciousness is in a whole separate category from bee-awareness. There is indeed a continuum of Information complexity from atoms to humans, but it's still a hierarchy, with silly self-important humans on top.

I'm also wary of the label Cosmopsychism for the same reason --- although Phillip Goff's concept is closer to my own. This holistic concept is not the God of the Bible, but it is god-like in function. However, any personal characteristics are completely speculative, and possibly romantic. Instead, it's more like the god of Spinoza, who is "intimately mingled with the world" in the form of the ubiquitous energy of Information (Universal Substance). :smile:

Cosmopsychism : Phillip Goff -- "If we combine holism with panpsychism, we get cosmopsychism: the view that the Universe is conscious",
https://aeon.co/essays/cosmopsychism-explains-why-the-universe-is-fine-tuned-for-life

Cosmopsychism vs Enformationism : “agentive cosmopsychism”
http://www.bothandblog.enformationism.info/page53.html

Spinoza's Universal Substance : https://iep.utm.edu/spinoz-m/

The mass-energy-information equivalence principle : https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5123794

You have to explain *why* science cannot explain, which means describing its properties such that they aren't amenable to scientific modelling.
— Kenosha Kid

David Chalmers does that in 'facing up to the hard problem', to wit:

The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.
— David Chalmers — Wayfarer

You know, the bulk of this paragraph can be summarised as: "Chalmers can use the terms 'subjective aspect of information-processing', 'experience', 'felt quality' and 'state of experience' as synonyms". Other than that, he enumerates a few experiences. "dark and light"... pretty much the first neurons that fire when the retina is excited detect dark and light. What we want is not a stating of the obvious that we experience dark and light, but the distinction between "experiencing dark and light" and "detecting dark and light". What can we point as a property in our experiences that goes beyond "this is light" or "this is dark".

Analogously, what is the distinction between "I experience pleasure" and "my nucleus accumbens is stimulated"?

The eliminativist claims that it is possible in principle to provide an account of the nature of experience in third-person terms, continuous with the other sciences; in other words, the first-person sense of experience can be eliminated without loosing anything essential to it. — Wayfarer

I'm not an eliminativist. I think maybe Isaac is closer to that than myself. I do not deny that you or I have subjective experiences. My question to khaled was: what properties do they have that are not accounted for neurologically? If you look at a red ball on the table in front of you, what subjective experience of a property of that red ball do you have that is additional to the third-person view, beyond the fact that it is happening to you not someone else.

That said, I also suspect we're drifting from panpsychism a lot. The point of course is to identify a property of an electron or an atom or a living cell that can be said to be this additional property that consciousness has that a future neurological description of a conscious thing will not account for.

I try to avoid the misleading term Panpsychism, due to its implication that bees and atoms are conscious in a manner similar to human awareness. This may sound anthro-centric to some, but human-self-consciousness is in a whole separate category from bee-awareness. There is indeed a continuum of Information complexity from atoms to humans, but it's still a hierarchy, with silly self-important humans on top. — Gnomon

It may not be anthropocentric to say that human consciousness is categorically different to bee consciousness. A more telling comparison would be a chimp or a dolphin.

If one accepts both a) the primacy of awareness in one form of another, together will all that this entails (e.g., goal, and thereby telos, driven behaviors), this as an idealist would; and b) the logical necessity that life - and, thereby, the first-person awareness it can be deemed to necessitate - evolved from nonlife; what other conceivable, logically consistent inference could one arrive at other than that of panpsychism?

As you’ve alluded to, the “biggism” brand of panpsychism which bert1 refers to is a modern rebranding of the Stoic Anima Mundi. In such form of panpsychism, prior to the emergence of life in the cosmos, the cosmos would yet have been an animated given governed by Logos and its universal telos (the “universal end” the first quote in your post makes reference to). What awareness, or consciousness, or mind, or psyche/anima means in the context of a cosmos devoid of life is to me still a riddle. But, so far, the conclusion of panpsychism (in some variety or other) seems to me well enough justified - here claiming this as someone who upholds both (a) and (b) aforementioned.

I’m asking because I’ve gained the impression that you don’t find the panpsychism hypothesis appealing—while yet upholding both (a) and (b) as tenets.

I might be wrong in my presumptions regarding your outlook, however.

He is called the seminal Logos (logos spermatikos). This Logos is at the same time a force and a law, — New Advent Encyclopedia

At the begining was the word, and the word was with God. John 1

It may not be anthropocentric to say that human consciousness is categorically different to bee consciousness. A more telling comparison would be a chimp or a dolphin. — Kenosha Kid

Yes. But the categorical difference between our own and chimp/dolphin consciousness, is that human self-awareness has created a whole new form of Evolution : Culture. The evolutionary process has accelerated since humans became the dominant species. Unfortunately, human Morality has difficulty keeping up the pace with Technology. :smile:

But the categorical difference between our own and chimp/dolphin consciousness, is that human self-awareness has created a whole new form of Evolution : Culture. — Gnomon

Haven't read up on dolphins but, as a fun tidbit, chimpanzee cohorts have their own unique cultures (with a small "C").

For example: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2195890-unique-chimpanzee-cultures-are-disappearing-thanks-to-humans/

[

If one accepts both a) the primacy of awareness in one form of another, together will all that this entails (e.g., goal, and thereby telos, driven behaviors), this as an idealist would; and b) the logical necessity that life - and, thereby, the first-person awareness it can be deemed to necessitate - evolved from nonlife; what other conceivable, logically consistent inference could one arrive at other than that of panpsychism? — javra

A psychism limited to certain life forms.

A psychism limited to certain life forms. — Olivier5

Maybe this needs clarification: if primacy of awareness is true, and a universe that was once devoid of life-forms is also true ... then what other viable conclusion to reconcile these two truths?

But the categorical difference between our own and chimp/dolphin consciousness, is that human self-awareness has created a whole new form of Evolution : Culture. — Gnomon

But this just defers the categorisation problem. Now we have explain why a human matriarchal tribe somewhere is a culture but a non-human matriarchal primate tribe is not. This isn't obviously easier than explaining why humans are conscious but primates are not. In fact, it's harder, since we also have to show that consciousness is the cause of culture. What we call cultural transmission -- memetics -- is observed in many animal species. These animals and no others being found to be conscious would be a great indicator that consciousness is indeed the driver of culture. Unfortunately we're trying to show that only humans are conscious. This is generally the mucking fuddle we get into when we try to show that humans a qualitatively different from, rather than just more complex and successful than, related animal species.

There is indeed a continuum of Information complexity from atoms to humans, but it's still a hierarchy, with silly self-important humans on top. — Gnomon

Yes and no. :grin:

Panpsychism is a non-starter for a science-informed metaphysics because "consciousness all the way down" explains nothing and just defers explanation.

But clearly, even physics has changed its materialist paradigm to now think of physical reality as somehow a product of "information". So science is also proving it is not adverse to a radical paradigm shift here. A metaphysics of material/efficient cause has been making way for a metaphysics of formal/final cause in some guise.

So something like a pan-informational view of the Universe, or better yet, a pan-semiotic view, has emerged. And via that, a science-based understanding of "consciousness" can be suitably naturalised. We can see how what humans do is explained within some totally generalised "physical theory of everything".

Yet even if we accept a physics which says "everything is an informational process all the way down, rather than a material process all the way up," this same ToE must make a hard distinction between "mindless physical systems" and "mindful living systems".

So there is a generalised informational/semiotic process that applies to the inorganic and non-organismic world. This is covered pretty well in unmysterious fashion by thermodynamics and quantum holism. We can understand reality and the emergence of its dissipative structures in terms of its generalised drive to entropify.

The shift from the old materialist paradigm to a new informational paradigm is about how a material world would self-organise in emergent fashion from the demands of entropy-maximising flow.

That is just untroubled science these days.

And then, likewise, we can also see how life and mind are both embedded in this generalised entropic flow, and have some extra trick - an epistemic cut - that lifts them to a different level in regards to that flow. Life and mind have the trick of memory, the trick of a modelling relationship with their material environments, the trick of being able to harness entropic gradients and direct them towards their own organismic ends.

So that makes a hierarchy with a sharp division. The foundation is a brute material world of entropy flows and the structures and patterns that must produce. Then the further thing is the evolution of semiotic mechanisms - truly informational substrates like membranes, genes, neurons, words, numbers - to support a world of self-interestedly entropifying organisms.

Again, panpsychism is a theory that is "not even wrong" as whether it is the case or not, makes no difference. Panpsychists still explain atoms vs amoeba vs chimps vs humans in terms of genetic information, neural information and cultural information.

And that still leaves "consciousness" as completely unexplained as it is by material reductionism.

The only difference is that physical materialists have to say that consciousness somehow pops out at the end. And panpsychists have to claim it was always there - in some invisible and maximally attentuated fashion - from the beginning. It is just a different choice about which carpet the essential explanandum gets swept under.

But biology, neuroscience and social psychology have already long shifted to a worldview that accepts reality is a combo of matter and information. Or to be more precise, a semiotic interaction between the two.

Consciousness - in that view - is simply what it is like to be in a meaningful and intentional semiotic modelling relation with the world. It feels like something to be an organism engaged in the world via a complex interpretive relation because ... well, why wouldn't that feel like something. It must feel like exactly what it is. An enactive or embodied psychological relation.

And then happily, the physical sciences have shifted from an uber-materialist metaphysics towards a information-based one.

The Universe isn't gaining a "mind" in the process as to have a mind is to have the kind of private point of view that a semiotic interpretive relationship is all about. But it does then allow the Universe to be modelled overtly in terms of its formal and final causes - as for instance, the laws of thermodynamics. So the metaphysics becomes "mindful" in that important respect.

So panpsychism is bunk because it is a simple inversion of the failures of materialism.

Materialism shrugs and says consciousness must pop out due to "sufficient complexity". And that emergence thesis is meaningless to the degree materialism offers no proper model of "complexity". Meanwhile panpsychism shrugs its shoulders and says consciousness is always there in matter, even when it is ultimately simple. And panpsychism then offers no proper model of this simplicity. It just claims property dualism as a logically necessary fact.

But physics was in need of metaphysical reform. That is happening with an information theoretic perspective that shows how a generalised material simplicity can arise from "complex" chaos. The Comos could arise as a self-organised dissipative structure - the Big Bang universe.

And the biological sciences also had to finish the job on modelling actual complexity - systems that are organismic in that they can embody their own formal/final causes. That too is a project that has moved at great speed these past 50 years.

So, since, as per panpsychism, only things have mind/souls, a part can't have one since, after all, it isn't even a thing to begin with. — TheMadFool

Right, a part only exists in relation to a whole, and mind/soul would be attributed to the whole.

Sorry but I can't see your point. Begin from any point in an organized system - bottom-up or top-down, you're eventually going to have to make a jump from a whole to its parts and wherever, whenever, this happens, you're at risk of commiting the fallacy of composition/division. — TheMadFool

Why do I need to "jump from a whole to its parts"? We can talk about a whole and its parts all in the same context. No jump is required. You are proposing that we divide the whole up, but then you want to keep talking about the whole as if it still exists after its been divided.

Are you asking how it is possible that a thing can be divided in two, and both halves might have the same attribute that the whole had? Isn't this like asking how it is possible that a red thing might be divided, and both halves might still be red? Why not ask the more interesting question of how it is possible that a single celled organism can divide, and become two copies of the very same thing? What are the two a copy of, each other, the original, or something else?

No jump is required — Metaphysician Undercover

Premise 1: Everything has a soul (panpsychism)

Premise 2: Everything about a car (its parts and the car whole) is a thing

Conclusion: The parts of a car have souls. The car, as a whole, has a (one) soul. The car has many souls (parts) and the car has one soul (the car as a whole) [CONTRADICTION!!]

Proposed resolution of the contradiction: the parts and the whole are different kinds of things and that's why parts can be many souls and the car, as a whole, can have one soul.

Problem with the proposed resolution: a jump has been made from parts to wholes because necessarily the everything in "everything has a soul" (panpsychism) can't be refer to both parts and wholes [because if it does the contradiction I obtained above stands] and so an inference from either parts to wholes (bottom-up) or an inference from wholes to parts (top-down) has to be made and then the fallacy of composition and the fallacy of division becomes a clear and present danger.

Premise 1: Everything has a soul (panpsychism)

Premise 2: Everything about a car (its parts and the car whole) is a thing

Conclusion: The parts of a car have souls. The car, as a whole, has a (one) soul. The car has many souls (parts) and the car has one soul (the car as a whole) [CONTRADICTION!!] — TheMadFool

You seem to be missing the point. Either you are talking about the car as one unified entity, or you are not talking about a car, but a bunch of separate things, existing independently which could be used to make a car. The contradiction is in saying that there is both, at the same time, a unified car, and also a bunch of independent parts. The car cannot have one soul as "a car", and also many souls as "a bunch of independent parts", at the same time, because it cannot fulfill these two distinct descriptions at the same time. Therefore there is no problem with contradiction. There is only contradiction if you think that it is, at the same time, both a car and a bunch of independent separate things.

Take the following symbol for example: 8. Either this symbol represents one unified whole, consisting of eight parts, or it represents eight independent things. Clearly it is the former, it represents a unified group of eight. To assign to each of the eight, a separate, independent existence would be to deny their status as eight which requires that they are a unified group. We can say that the group has a "form", represented as "8". It does not have eight independent forms.

So that makes a hierarchy with a sharp division. The foundation is a brute material world of entropy flows and the structures and patterns that must produce. Then the further thing is the evolution of semiotic mechanisms - truly informational substrates like membranes, genes, neurons, words, numbers - to support a world of self-interestedly entropifying organisms. — apokrisis

How does that follow from the premise that the universe has been partly negentropic from the Big Bang get go? This being something you’ve previously stipulated in other threads.

Upholding a partly negentropic universe that is, and has always been, governed by teleological and formal principles is nothing short of a proposal for an Anima Mundi, i.e. for an animated cosmos with teleological strivings, this being a form of panpsychism. Only that, to the staunch materialist, this flavoring of “anima/psyche” can only be an object of ridicule. And this due to a deeply engrained materialistic dogma that needs to be safeguarded.

On the other hand, if there indeed is upheld a sharp division between the entropic and the negentropic, as you’ve here asserted, then how can a fully entropic system logically give rise to negentropy? The empirical fact that life (which is negentropic) emerged from nonlife (which you here specify as being sharply entropic) does not, in and of itself, provide a shred of explanation of how this could have come about.

Again, panpsychism is a theory that is "not even wrong" as whether it is the case or not, makes no difference. Panpsychists still explain atoms vs amoeba vs chimps vs humans in terms of genetic information, neural information and cultural information. — apokrisis

And so panpsychism is not something that, of itself, makes a difference. Granted. Notwithstanding, the primacy of awareness, from which the stance of panpsychim can be derived, does. A reading of C. S. Peirce's philosophy can illustrate how. With one example being that of the objective world being effete mind; another being the difference in where the cosmos is headed: a difference that is exceedingly substantial.

But I gather the primacy of awareness is a bit too theistic reeking for the materialistically minded. So, to avoid that slippery slope into monotheism or some such, it must be denied tout court.

Either you are talking about the car as one unified entity, or you are not talking about a car, but a bunch of separate things, existing independently which could be used to make a car. — Metaphysician Undercover

A car is in fact the worst kind of example as a car is a machine and not an organism.

The whole point of a car is that it exists as the expression of some engineer's wishes and designs. So it is an example of nature that is as much an arrangement of dumb components as is materially possible. It is an example of the maximally unnatural, in other words. It is built to be as little subject to holistic physical processes - like rusting or change - as possible.

It is thus a Cartesian object - the sophisticated expression of a human capacity to separate top-down informational constraints from bottom-up material processes. It is dualism made real.

The engineer becomes a god ruling nature - an intellectual willing soul. The world becomes a realm of passive material action.

But that is the reality of artifice, not the reality of nature.

The car cannot have one soul as "a car", and also many souls as "a bunch of independent parts", at the same time, because it cannot fulfill these two distinct descriptions at the same time. — Metaphysician Undercover

So, when there's a whole car there are no parts and when there are parts there's no car? So, when the car is being assembled piece by piece the souls of the parts conveniently vanish and the soul of the car comes into existence when the car is being disassembled, the souls of the parts magically reappear and the soul of the car vanishes? Is this what you're saying? If you are then everything doesn't have a soul for the simple reason that the parts are still things even when they're all assembled together into a car and, according to you, they don't have souls when they are so.

Okay. But I'm not locking anyone out or fortifying against new, anticipated, arguments for the proposition. I'm just calling it out as an incoherent concept fallaciously arrived at. Like saying 'the atoms of strawberries taste like strawberries'. :nerd: Feel free is dispel the analogy and correct my criticisms. My "fortress", csal, is the wide open wild spaces of where sound inferences roam free ... like apex predators. :smirk: — 180 Proof

Okay. But I'm not locking anyone out or fortifying against new, anticipated, arguments for the proposition. I'm just calling it out as an incoherent concept fallaciously arrived at. — 180 Proof

Yeah, I get the apex predator thing. Maybe a better analogy would be a fortress + good logistics + divine armor + divine weapons. The Iliad complex: a righteous cause, tight tactics, traceable lineage of armory, gods on your side.

Meriones gave Odysseus bow, quiver and sword and over his head he set a helmet made of leather. Inside it was crisscrossed taut with many thongs, outside the gleaming teeth of a white-tusked boar ran round and round in rows stitched neat and tight - a master craftsman's work, the cap in its center padded soft with felt. The Wolf Himself Autolycus lifted that splendid headgear out of Eleon once, he stole it from Ormenus' son Amyntor years ago, breaching his sturdy palace walls one night, then passed it on to Amphidamas, Cythera-born, Scandia-bound. Amphidamas gave it to Molus, a guest-gift once that Molus gave Meriones his son to wear in battle. And now it encased Odysseus' head, snug around his brows"

There's a whole machinery that lets the heroes get real nasty - something subtends their courage, if you like. Homer loves lion and sheep metaphors, but the heroes that those lion-metaphors apply to only get to the lion-point after all the 'secretly aided by gods" stuff. Maybe the difference between us and, say, Dimoedes is that Diomedes would never brag about his confrontation with the void, because everyone would laugh him out of the room. You only boast about confronting the void, if youve lost some confrontation. The loss irks you and then you make your experience of being-knocked-down a victory. I mean this is zero-level compensation. Sometimes I think you let your Brassier drown out your Nietzsche.

At some level, 'apex predator' on a forum is just a metamorphosis (metastasis?) of choosing badass anime fighters for one's avatar. Boys in a Sandbox, right? Here is my homebase: this action figure is here and says this, and this action figure is here and says that, and etc etc. The 'Apex Predator' thing is always based in the fortress, eventually.

Ok.

I don't want to get into the weeds here. You can parse that as fear of being shown wrong, if you like. I've stopped wanting to think things through by defending against people who think of themselves as apex predators, against kids who have the best action figures. The problem with the strawberry thing you bring up is that of course the taste of strawberries is emergent. But I think it less useful to argue for panpsychism by explaining why that is the case than to ask why you think the atoms-like-strawberries is a good 'in', a knock-down reductio (it's patently not) rather than a move by a self-styled apex predator characterizing a panpsychist sheep's thought (strawberries, curious, why that particular thing?)