Thursday, November 14, 2024

Natural born dualists

 


Emerson Green (a heterodox atheist or perhaps agnostic) is currently a panpsychist. In this clip, he argues that humans are instinctively biased *against* panpsychism. 

Natural selection has turned us into "natural born dualists". Ironically, even physicalists (materalists) think in a "dualist" fashion when attacking panpsychism, since they can only conceive of one possible alternative to everything being physical: that consciousness is indeed freely floating around in a realm of its own...

Evolution hasn´t given us the ability to detect all forms of consciousness. Doctors can miss that "coma" patients are really conscious. There are also a lot of cultural constructs and bad theorizing about consciousness. We understand that our pet dogs are sentient, but don´t care about wild animals. Descartes, notoriously, claimed that pets weren´t really conscious either!

One problem with Green´s presentation is that many people surely *do* experience everything as conscious. Small children who think that their toys can speak or have imaginary friends is a good example. Another is animism. The consciousness Green describes might be a culturally conditioned or genetically mutated *modern* consciousness. What if our default setting actually is panpsychist?  

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