Panpsychism

Andy Clark shifts the philosophical emphasis from analysis of the brain to analysis of a human’s kinesthetic interaction with an ecological and social space. He points out that large-scale social projects, such as a building project or a disaster relief effort, occur across a considerably extended space and through the intersection of many people’s minds, and are not limited to neuronal firings in any individual brain. Clark, in a joint paper with David Chalmers, discusses the fictional example of Otto, a man with memory problems who remembers the location of a library (and other useful pieces of information) by writing it down in a notebook. They argue that Otto’s memory is literally in the notebook, not in his brain. Similarly, much of the memory of all of us arguably now resides in a variety of electronic devices.

A more robust form of criticism of the reductionist program comes from a revival of panpsychism by philosophers such as Galen Strawson and Gregg Rosenberg, and physicists such as Henry Stapp. They concur with Alfred North Whitehead’s view that for consciousness to be anywhere in nature it must be everywhere in nature, and with William James’ view that our stream of consciousness is open to intrusions from an environmentally-pervasive conscious ‘more’. In other words, everything has an element of consciousness. For most of the materialists, consciousness exists only as a rare occurrence in the brains of a single or a few species (if at all). The panpsychists charge that on this account, consciousness is a complete ‘ontological dangler’: a few anomalous islands of consciousness surface, for little apparent reason, in a vast sea of insentient and unconscious dead matter. Strawson, Stapp and Rosenberg object that the materialist picture arises from a Newtonian misunderstanding of matter. However, in quantum physics, matter may not be insentient, unconscious and dead, but have an element of consciousness too.

by Laura Weed http://www.philosophynow.org/issue87/Philosophy_of_Mind_An_Overview