Priority monism and cosmopsychism

 

Waking Cosmos (alias metaRising) is a YouTube channel devoted to a mostly pro-panpsychist view exploration of the mind-body problem. This mini-documentary is a good example, arguing that consciousness may be a basic property of the universe or existence itself, perhaps even *the* basic property. WC takes both idealism and panpsychism seriously, and also discusses a position known as "neutral monism". There is also "primary monism" and "cosmopsychism", a position claiming that the entire universe is basic, more concretely that consciousness is cosmic in nature, rather than split up in atomistic fashion in individual minds. 

A modern form of panpsychism, which claims to make testable predictions, is called IIT or Integrated Information Theory. IIT argues that each bit of "information" has two poles, corresponding to matter and consciousness - an idea strikingly similar to Whitehead´s creative occasions or even some kind of occult monads. In general, I get the feeling that scientific or philosophical ideas based on idealism and panpsychism are really reinventing the wheels of "Hindu" metaphysics, the main difference being that the modern versions claim that the world is real, not a mayic "illusion". 

While this is all very interesting, some of the arguments in the presentation strike me as strange (although, admittedly, I never read Russell or Eddington). The idea is that science can "only" describe what matter does, not what matter intrinsically is. But what if matter *is* a certain kind of relations and movements, rather than something "intrinsic"? Why the dualism between the appearence (matter in motion?) and the essence (matter at rest?). Also, why must there be a one-to-one correspondence between mathematical equations and the thing descibed? Maybe math is an approximate abstraction and simply doesn´t work that way. Of course, this doesn´t disprove panpsychism - in a way, it makes it more likely, since consciousness could be one of the "relations", these relations being impossible to fully grasp by equations... 

Which brings me to the closing statements in the docu, where WC says that a panpsychist or idealist view of consciousness would - for the first time since the Copernican revolution - make humanity more important and central, rather than de-centering it (which heliocentrism, Darwinism and Freudianism supposedly did). I beg to differ. Yes, panpsychism would make humanity less "alien" in the cosmos, since we are bearers of the properly basic thing called consciousness, but so is everything else! This is especially true if the super-consciousness of the entire system is basic. In the bigger scheme of things, we might not be more important than animals, plants or black holes. 

Ironically, panpsychism might therefore prove to be the most de-centering thing hitherto. Dreams of Great Cthulhu...