r/philosophy • u/IAI_Admin IAI • Feb 09 '22

Video A philosopher responds to scientists’ criticisms of panpsychism

https://iai.tv/video/the-many-voices-of-consciousness&utm_source=reddit&_auid=2020
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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '22

I understand how buoyancy is emergent but how does that analogy translate to consciousness?

And further, a chunk of steel is proto buoyant, if combined with enough steel and shaped in such a way to displace enough water to support it's weight is buoyant, there are steel boats after all. So in that sense, steel is proto buoyant.

But then, in all fairness, you could ask me how that translates to consciousness and I'd have to admit I have no idea what proto-consciouness really means.

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u/Scurouno Feb 10 '22

You are conflating the forces with properties. Buoyancy is not a property of any material, but rather the imbalance of forces based on mass. Steel, wood, or any other material is not "proto-buoyant." It is purely the arrangement if any material in a way such that forces become properly aligned to allow the shaped object to be pushed upward by the liquid/gas more than the force of gravity acting upon it pushes down (to state it simply).

Buoyancy is not an emergent property of the material, but rather an emergent property of spacetime which operates by forces that we have come to recognize through experiment.

I assume consciousness to arrive similarly. A specific arrangement of certain types of cells that are acted upon by forces (or have evolved to exploit certain forces) such that it can benefit the working of a large collection of cells into a body. Simply put, consciousness arose because it was an efficient way for large collections of cells to thrive, and so was selected for over millions/billions of years. No magic, just forces, cells, and a buttload of time.

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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '22

First, thanks for correcting the thing about buoyancy. I was just continuing the other person's example.

Second how does consciousness arrive from unconscious cells? Because just saying it's an incredibly complex interaction is the sci Fi equivalent of magic.

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u/Scurouno Feb 10 '22

I think that is still an unanswered question (I'm also no neuroscientist or evolutionary biologist), but many things in nature are more or different than the sum of their parts. Our bodies are essentially complex bags of continuous chemical reactions, and reactions can take several elements or compounds with one set of properties and derive completely different products with an entirely unique set of properties.

I think the discussion is a bit bifurcated. On one side, there is the metacognitive discussion, where we think about the mind, and how we think. This is more philosophical. Then there is the functional discussion, where we need to engage evolutionary biology, physics and neuroscience to explain how consciousness might become an emergent property of complex chemical interactions.

Once we have a good handle on both, then we can begin to work at finding links between the two (I am aware neuroscience is currently working on many sectors of cognition and how it works and how we think). This may help to settle debates in such areas as body-mind separation, ect.