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Excerpts of discussions about David Chalmers's The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos, and Paul Auster's City of Glass.
What's the relation between mind and brain? What is consciousness? Can science study consciousness, and can evolution really account for it? What is the self and how does this relate to language? All these questions are tackled in these discussions, which were recorded as part of PEL's Not School members-only website (aka PEL Citizenship). Each was recorded by a PEL podcaster (Mark or Wes, for the ones here) in conjunction with 2-5 listeners who joined a Not School group. Not School gives us the chance to cover more material than we have time to tackle as a full PEL group as well as the chance to get to talk with such great people: the listeners involved are often fully as articulate and informative as the guests we've had on the show, with expertise not only in philosophy, but in science, the arts, and other disciplines. (Don't be intimidated though; we've got active Not Schoolers of all levels.) Yes, the recording quality is not nearly as good as for our regular episodes, but you'll get past it.
Read more and sign up at www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/pel-not-school-introduction. This will give you access to the full-length (ca. 90 min) recordings of these, plus lots of supporting forum posts on these readings. Best yet, you can join these ongoing groups yourselves, among many others. New ones are being proposed now to kick off at the beginning of January, so get in there to try to draft people into reading what you want to read (or listen to, or watch).
Frank Callo says
December 17, 2012 at 4:28 pmI want to direct my comments primarily to the first section of this minisode.
I wonder if Spinoza came up anywhere in this discussion beyond what is presented here. Seems that some of the points that were made Re panpsychism can be profitably explored through Spinoza’s distinction between thought and extension. Spinoza posited something like “thought (mind?) is a property of the universe in the same way extension in space is”. If this is so, then some of what Chalmers seems (from what I gather here) is saying is that mind might not be reducable to physical process because it is simply an aspect of what those processes ARE. This is where Nagel comes in because mind is what, a bat for example, is TO ITSELF. The mind of a bat is a property of “batness”. It isn’t reducable to something else for the same reason that you can’t explain why a triangle has three angles which must always equal 180 degrees. There isn’t an explanation because “180 degreeness” is part of what it is to BE a triangle.
The various states that the brain (or a thermostat {or a stone}) can be in are distinguished, one from another, by differences between those states but the thing that is in one state, then another, trancends, MUST TRANCEND, those states in order for the states to come about. If this is not the case, the brain in one state or another is a different thing entirely from what it is in other states. In such a situation it would be nearly impossible to know what we are even talking about. The mind, it seems to me, might be the way a brain is (or anything else is) from inside, so to speak, the continuity of the thing which is no new problem in philosophy, it rests down there with that old “thing in itself”.
I think you dealt with this problem in a different way in the episode on Chaung Tzu. I think, in general, that the Taoist classics have a lot to say about the problem of “is-ness”, perhaps the mind is the isness of the thing.
Mark Linsenmayer says
December 18, 2012 at 1:45 amIf you must call it a minisode, call it a triminisode. It is only mini in relation to our normal sodes. Compared to a regular podcast, it is totally standard sized.
Seriously, though, yes, I should really re-listen to that Spinoza episode, and I would like to do a real panpsychism PEL episode at some point. For this discussion, we had enough trouble just figuring out the Chalmers book and didn’t try to bring in outside stuff, and what he has to say about panpsychism is mostly just suggestive, namely that we’re driven to some form of this view because it doesn’t make sense for qualia to just suddenly wink into existence when you have a certain complexity of structure. Since he thinks that the phenomenal is not explained by (in that it’s conceptually separable from) the physical, then a physical (or functional) description is not going to give an account of consciousness… you’re not going to be able to explain why adding one more piece to a physical puzzle suddenly gives you consciousness. If you can’t build consciousness, therefore, it must be a fundamental feature of the world that merely takes the form it does for us because of a complex structure, i.e. because of our abilities and the contents of what we’re conscious of… the objects of our complex awareness. None of this can explain the raw property of awareness itself, but we can say a lot about what about our brains makes our experience structured in the way it is for us. There just has to be “experience” in its raw form before it can be structured in any particular way.
That’s the best I can do to make sense of a pretty strange view.
dmf says
January 11, 2013 at 8:44 amone related take, via Whitehead, is panexperientialism, which is also pretty out there but less so than full blown panpsychisms, Steven Shaviro would be a good guest for such a discussion:
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/22351462
dmf says
January 11, 2013 at 8:44 amhttp://www.shaviro.com/Othertexts/Claremont2010.pdf
Alan Cook says
January 10, 2013 at 12:24 pmJust saw these responses here.
I agree that panpsychism is a view to be taken very seriously, and that Spinoza is the most important expositor of that position in the modern European tradition. Would be interested in taking a closer look at him.
Re Daoism: I love reading Chuang Tzu, but ancient Chinese texts pose tremendous hermeneutic difficulties. Seems to me that discussions among contemporary Westerners who aren’t specialists in are more discussions of a particular translator’s or interpretator’s theories than they are of something that we can identify as a “Daoist view.”
dmf says
January 11, 2013 at 8:37 amto my knowledge Spinoza was not an advocate of panpychism but I would be interested in any primary source textual references in support of such a view that you might have to share.