What Do You Call A Guy Who Thinks He Was Jack The Ripper In A Previous Life?
If you haven’t been following the Derb’s notes on the consciousness studies conference he’s attending, you should be. This stuff is awesome.
You can follow along here and here and here and here and here and no doubt in further posts in The Corner, so do check back again later today or tomorrow.
As someone with a lot of instinctive sympathy for Roger Penrose’s position on these matters (in a nutshell: quantum reality is really strange; the “hard problem” of consciousness is really strange; quantum reality is really strange in ways that seem to implicate consciousness in the structure of reality itself; and neuronal microtubules appear to present a mechanism for quantum-level reality to be implicated in the functioning of consciousness; therefore some version of panpsychism may actually correspond to reality), I’m very encouraged that there’s some real research going on in this area, producing actual data. I’m also really excited to learn a new word – hylozoism – that turns out actually to be an old word, and a very good conjecture to boot.
Oh: the answer to the title question? A metempsychotic.
I got a million of ‘em.
Aren’t you sort of begging the question? Isn’t the notion that “real research… producing actual data” is preferable to the alternative actually one of the assumptions that is challenged by panpsychism?
I find this is often too large of a distance to cross, usually, when arguing about problems of religion, science and the limits of human understanding. Someone will say “You haven’t answered scientific question x with scientific evidence”; but part of the point, of course, is that the inability to answer a scientific question in scientific terms is disqualifying only if you’ve already presumed a preference for scientific evidence…. (Sort of like the capitalist who, when he hears an argument criticizing capitalism, says “But the capitalist method is so much more profitable….”
— Freddie · Apr 10, 08:25 PM · #
Freddie: I’m not sure I follow you. Why would (any of the various hypotheses that go by the name of) panpsychism challenge the assumption that data is good?
— Noah Millman · Apr 10, 08:40 PM · #
I don’t know, I was mostly just being a punk. It’s been a long day.
— Freddie · Apr 10, 09:25 PM · #
I wonder if prayer is a subject addressed during the conference. Praying people often have stories of having a moment here and there of awareness of someone else’s needs without being told.
— Joules · Apr 12, 02:07 AM · #