Copernicus
Industrial Grade Linguist
Untermensche, that is roughly what I was saying, but the important point about emergence is that the functional entities that emerge from the substrate have properties that are not necessarily predictable from the properties of the components that make up the system. I don't think that we are having a substantive disagreement here.
I really don't like the term "pansychism", because it sounds like an unnecessarily anthropomorphic term. For example, you can measure a magnetic field and observe how it is affected by interactions with different environmental conditions. However, there is a sense in which magnetic physical objects are "aware" of each other, because bringing them closer together either repels or attracts, depending on how the poles are aligned with each other. Human bodies are also repelled and attracted by animate and inanimate things, but in a far more subtle and less measurable way. Unlike with magnets, the forces that repel and attract human bodies are far more complex and difficult to explain. We could call them cognitive or mental forces, but the fact is that bodies are attracted or repelled by their neural guidance systems. So it is really misleading to use a term like "panpsychism" when referring to physical interactions that are not mediated by a kind of neural guidance system. The objects that we call "human bodies" are not at all like the objects that we call "magnets". It is a mistake to conflate the forces of attraction and repulsion with a term like "panpsychism". Self-awareness, for example, is an emergent property of a neural system, and it seems to have no useful analog in an electromagnetic system.
Panpsychism sounds almost like a kind of pantheism to me, and I suppose that is because deities are so anthropomorphic to begin with. It doesn't really seem to say much other than that the mind is a mysterious force that somehow just works to move bodies around. If you want to explain how a mind works, you have to analyze it into functional components, and that takes us very far away from simple interactions between physical objects.
I'm not wedded to the term "create". You could just as well say "gives rise to". The point is that chaos theory helps us to understand how minds came into existence without a need for us to just throw up our hands and declare that everything is explained by materialism. To me, physical reality is a multi-tiered system of emergent layers, each of which can be explained in its own functional terms or by reference to the underlying mechanics that give rise to the system. An important corollary of this idea is that very different mechanical interactions can converge on the same functionality by serendipitous means. Both fish and aquatic mammals acquired fins through evolution, but the fins don't necessarily have a common origin. The jawbone in reptiles is said to correlate with bones in the human ear, but both reptiles and humans have hearing. The functional aspect of hearing just happened to emerge from different parts of the anatomy over millions of years of evolutionary divergence.
I really don't like the term "pansychism", because it sounds like an unnecessarily anthropomorphic term. For example, you can measure a magnetic field and observe how it is affected by interactions with different environmental conditions. However, there is a sense in which magnetic physical objects are "aware" of each other, because bringing them closer together either repels or attracts, depending on how the poles are aligned with each other. Human bodies are also repelled and attracted by animate and inanimate things, but in a far more subtle and less measurable way. Unlike with magnets, the forces that repel and attract human bodies are far more complex and difficult to explain. We could call them cognitive or mental forces, but the fact is that bodies are attracted or repelled by their neural guidance systems. So it is really misleading to use a term like "panpsychism" when referring to physical interactions that are not mediated by a kind of neural guidance system. The objects that we call "human bodies" are not at all like the objects that we call "magnets". It is a mistake to conflate the forces of attraction and repulsion with a term like "panpsychism". Self-awareness, for example, is an emergent property of a neural system, and it seems to have no useful analog in an electromagnetic system.
Panpsychism sounds almost like a kind of pantheism to me, and I suppose that is because deities are so anthropomorphic to begin with. It doesn't really seem to say much other than that the mind is a mysterious force that somehow just works to move bodies around. If you want to explain how a mind works, you have to analyze it into functional components, and that takes us very far away from simple interactions between physical objects.
I'm not wedded to the term "create". You could just as well say "gives rise to". The point is that chaos theory helps us to understand how minds came into existence without a need for us to just throw up our hands and declare that everything is explained by materialism. To me, physical reality is a multi-tiered system of emergent layers, each of which can be explained in its own functional terms or by reference to the underlying mechanics that give rise to the system. An important corollary of this idea is that very different mechanical interactions can converge on the same functionality by serendipitous means. Both fish and aquatic mammals acquired fins through evolution, but the fins don't necessarily have a common origin. The jawbone in reptiles is said to correlate with bones in the human ear, but both reptiles and humans have hearing. The functional aspect of hearing just happened to emerge from different parts of the anatomy over millions of years of evolutionary divergence.
