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I guess I meant physicalism then. Or maybe naturalism? I didn't mean to make a claim on the philosophy of mind just that the world is simply the physical world.

• goatlover 10y ago
  It depends on whether physicalism can account for all aspects of mind along with abstract concepts and the laws of nature (or causation). To be a successful monism, one has to be able to explain everything in terms of that monism.
  • amasad 10y ago
    Yes, and many have done so. Marvin Minsky, Steven Pinker, and Daniel Dennet come to mind. In philosophy lingo I think it all ends up being functional physicalism.
    • goatlover 10y ago
      There's no consensus that Minsky, Pinker, Dennett have succeeded. Plenty of philosophers and scientists have disagreed with their arguments. Dennett's attempt rests on the controversial claim that we're actually p-zombies, and consciousness can be understood in only functional terms. This is prima facie absurd to many people.
      • amasad 10y ago
        Dennet's argument is simply an inversion of the causal chain: i.e mind is not the causer but the cause. "P-zombies" is kind of a non-starter when you think about it. I think LessWrong's essays on it shows that, here is one passage: "you can form a propositional belief that "Consciousness is without effect", and not see any contradiction at first, if you don't realize that talking about consciousness is an effect of being conscious. But once you see the connection from the general rule that consciousness has no effect, to the specific implication that consciousness has no effect on how philosophers write papers about consciousness, zombie-ism stops being intuitive and starts requiring you to postulate strange things." http://lesswrong.com/lw/p7/zombies_zombies/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/p7/zombies_zombies/
• CuriouslyC 10y ago
  Could you please elaborate in detail on the ways in which you feel that panpsychism fails?
  • amasad 10y ago
    I can't do it in detail, it'll take hours. From a simplicity point-of-view (Occam's razor) it adds an extraordinary claim while falling short on any evidence. Compare it to a physicalist account like Minsky, Hofstader, or Dennet where they don't require anything other than what we already know about the world. For further reading consider LessWrong's Zombies sequence which tackles Chalmer's arguments and property dualism in general https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Zombies_(sequence) https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Zombies_(sequence)
    • CuriouslyC 10y ago
      If you could boil it down into a few key sentences, what would they be? From my perspective WRT occam's razor, it looks quite different. If panpsychism is right, there is only one kind of matter. For panpsychism to be wrong, there has to be two different kinds of matter (conscious and unconscious), along with a mechanism to transition between the two states that is mediated by a physical process. Furthermore, despite the transition being mediated by a physical process, the difference between these two states is something undetectable to current science. Beyond that, if you assume consciousness is the result of some physical characteristic of brains (which materialists usually do), you have to realize that most of the biochemistry going on in brains is going on all over the body. Do my organs and other body parts have their own consciousness? Furthermore, our experience of consciousness doesn't even extend to the entire brain. What is different between non-conscious parts of the brain and conscious parts? Physically the neurons themselves are basically identical. If it is the way that they're connected, those connections just change the simple physical forces acting on the particles of the brain. You again have to answer the question of how simple physical forces convert matter from unconscious to conscious.
      • amasad 10y ago
        >For panpsychism to be wrong, there has to be two different kinds of matter (conscious and unconscious) I think you have it mixed up. Panpsychism is the dualist belief, although it differs than supernatural dualism it's still dualism. It says that matter is singular but had two properties the mental and the physical. Whereas materialism is monist all the way through. You raise good questions and science and philosophy are still working on it but it doesn't require any extra properties or matter and agrees with scientific evidence therefore simpler.