How can consciousness emerge from non-conscious material? If there is only one type of stuff, how is the potential for consciousness encoded in the building blocks of the universe?

In this episode we have the ancient philosophical mind-body problem to get our heads around, and the ever more popular solution, panpsychism: That is, the belief that everything material, no matter how small, has always had a component of consciousness in it. We get into what consciousness is, why it’s not an illusion; into subjective experience; we cover the rich history of the mind-body problem in philosophy, and we also confront the apparently magical emergence of consciousness from non-consciousness by exploring the arguments for panpsychism, and how new understandings from the last 100 years of science might change preconceptions about a panpsychist solution.

Fortunately, to understand this we have the hugely experienced author and analytical philosopher of mind, for many years at the university of Oxford and now at the university of Texas, professor Galen Strawson! Alongside over 140 papers, he has also written 12 books including “Consciousness and its place in nature”, “Things that bother me: Death, Freedom, the self etc” and his new book “Stuff, Quality and Structure”.

What we discuss:

00:00 intro

05:30 ‘Naturalism’ as a position.

07:00 Qualia explained.

09:30 There’s only one kind of stuff: identity metaphysics.

12:00 A criticism of life as narrative story.

14:30 what is the self?

17:20 There is no mystery of consciousness.

19:15 Locke’s Primary and Secondary Qualities clarified.

21:45 The history of the mind-body problem.

27:30 The interaction problem VS the combination problem.

30:30 Radical emergence of consciousness from non-consciousness is impossible.

32:30 The arguments for panpsychism.

34:00 Psychophysical laws - David Chalmers.

35:00 The rise of panpsychism.

36:30 Different types of panpsychism.

41:30 Separating between conscious stuff, and subjects of consciousness.

48:30 Cosmopansychism - patterns of excitation in the quantum field.

50:00 Cellular cognition - Agential behaviour is not proof of experience.

54:00 ‘Matter is energy’ assists panpsychist intuitions.

56:15 Who demands evidence is begging the question.

01:02:30 “A Global Replace” of consciousness in matter.

01:03:30 How would a world of panpsychist science look?01:06:30 Neuroscience: neural correlate reductionism.

01:09:30 Feelings evolved before reasoning.

01:11:30 Being is energy; being is becoming; being is qualititivity; being is mind.

01:13:15 A cosmological mind.

01:16:15 Teleology and Meaning.

Quote:Lee Smolen, “Qualia must be understood as aspects of nature, that is our commitment to naturalism, the philosophy that asserts that all that exists is part of the natural world science studies.”

References:

Galen Strawson, “Mental Reality”, 1994

Galen Strawson, “Against Narrativity” paper. 2004

Galen Strawson, “Realistic monism - why physicalism entails panpsychism”, 2006

Galen Strawson, “Mind and Being, The Primacy of panpsychism”, 2017