Panexperientialism

Panexperietialism or Panpsychism is the belief that mind, or consciousness, is omnipresent throughout the universe and is a fundamental aspect of the universe. It is a position I have argued from here, here and here.

It represents one side of the long running mind-body problem. David Chalmers is probably the most well known and respected person who argues this position. He wrote a great book called The Conscious Mind.   Daniel Dennett is the most well known and respected peson who takes the other position. Chalmers and Dennett have had many arguments over the years, and they represent the contemporary philosophical celebrities of this long-running debate. Interestingly, Chalmers and Dennett both believe in free-will.

What is also interesting is that regardless of what position you take in this argument (often called the hard problem of consciousness), either position is not necessarily incompatible with the whole notion of uploading.

To my delight, I came across several blogs today of people who hold the panpsychic point of view. Steve Esser's Guide to Reality (Ideas and Arguments Toward a New Worldview), Justin's Panexperientialism (Exploration of the Philosophical and Scientific implications of a Panexperientialist World View), and Doug Mackey's Qubikuity (Musings of a quantum module of perception embedded in the folds of an unfathomable cosmic superbeing). Doug wrote a science fiction book called Weird Scenes Inside The Godmind, published by Quantum Cosmos.

Steve Esser finished reading A Place for Consciousness: Probing the Deep Structure of the Natural World (Philosophy of Mind Series) by Gregg Rosenberg. Steve has this to say:

Clearly, I’m a fan of this book. This is no doubt partly because I was already persuaded by the panexperientialist approach to solving the mind/body problem (and I have believed Quantum Mechanics provided evidence for panexperientialism as well). But Rosenberg has added important new strength and depth to panexperientialist ideas by addressing the metaphysical problems posed by causality and showing their connection to the existence of subjective experience in the world. In particular, his system puts forth a credible way to solve the combination problem in showing how experience might participate in causal structures across all levels of nature, including our own “middle” macroscopic level.

Gregg Rosenberg has an online thesis, A Place for Consciousness, exploring the problems of causation and consciousness, leading to a panexperientialist solution.

Another good more science related book is by Goswami called the The Self-Aware Universe.

A few months back I spoke with Dr. Edward Close whose book Transcendental Physics I read, and is a good rigorous scientific covering of panpsychism. Dr. Close uses G. Spencer Brown's calculus of distinctions, from Brown's book Laws of Form.   John Lilly based a lot of his thinking around these laws of form. Saul Paul Sirag, who was mentioned in Robert Anton Wilson's book Cosmic Trigger, has a slideshow titled, G. Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form & John Lilly’s Take on It.

If you want to know more about panpsychism, Justin has listed many more good links on the subject:

Why I became a Panexperientialist by Charles Birch.

Panpsychism by William Seager (encyclopedia article).

Panpsychism by T.L.S. Sprigge (encyclopedia article)

Panexperientialist Physicalism and the Mind-Body problem by David Ray Griffin

Consciousness, Information and Panpsychism by William Seager

Whitehead's even more dangerous idea by Peter Fairleigh

Participation, Organization, and Mind: Toward a Participatory Worldview by David Skrbina. Interesting panpsychist theory based on ideas from chaos theory and nonlinear dynamics. Also contains an excellent history of panpsychism.

For a more mystical approach, I recommend Godspace.

Posted by paul at December 21, 2004 04:25 PM | TrackBack