There's no law that says I can't respect Richard Lewontin while disagreeing profoundly with him on the questions of materialism and atheism. And there's no law saying I can't disagree with Rupert Sheldrake's interest in panpsychism on the same basis, even while I believe its claim that all of matter has "consciousness" is just a game of word play. I respect Rupert Sheldrake on much the same basis I do Richard Lewontin while disagreeing with both of them.
Since materialists, "naturalists", "physicalists" - all the same thing under different names adopted as the 19th and 20th century meaning of materialism has been discredited by science - can't convince people that their and other peoples consciousness is an illusion and since the experience of consciousness is incompatible with materialism, "panpsychists" want to produce the same result as denying that there is any reality to consciousness by claiming that atoms and molecules and other "self-organizing entities" in nature are conscious. It is the same, exact ideological program of reductionism only admitting that materialist reductionism can't credibly dispose of consciousness. It can't do that without claiming that the "consciousness" of atoms and molecules - if not smaller units of matter that comprise those - is what is real and that our composite "emergent" consciousness is of lesser or negligible reality. And that is no advance on the problem of the ideology of materialism and the experience of consciousness.
For one thing, the word "consciousness" was used to name the most basic and all encompassing of human experiences, the experience of being conscious which means specifically that human experience. That was the reason the word was invented, the thing which is human experience, including all human acts of observation and analysis, that is what consciousness is.
We, or rather, most thoughtful people who experience consciousness and have the capacity or rather exercise the will to sympathize with them, extend that quality to animals on the basis of our observation of their obviously self-motivating behavior which exhibits the same qualities that our consciousness produces in us. That is those whose materialist or other ideologies or choice to not take that seriously don't lead us to deny what our empirical observation of other animals demonstrates about them*.
Our ability to make the choice to recognize the probability of consciousness in animals, though, is based on what the word means, why the word was created, to describe human experience, the action of consciousness in us. It is based on their self-motivated behavior, not on actions such as what gravity does to our bodies if we fall down or tornado winds blow us around, what Brownian motion does in moving the bodies of bacteria in water or the fluctuation of energy does to the position of electrons around a nucleus and atoms in a molecule.
I think attributing the human quality of consciousness we experience to atoms and molecules - having to radically change the meaning of the word in some unknowable and unstable way to give them something undefinable which a panpsychist merely calls by the same word - is too obviously done for the convenience of allegedly former materialists who realize that materialism can't be knowably true if consciousness is real. And everything we know to be true is only said to be true through our knowledge and knowledge is an aspect of consciousness.
We know everything we know through our consciousness. And if consciousness isn't real then we can't know anything, we as thinking entities don't actually exist and all of our experience is an ephemeral, subjective delusion made by non-existent entities. Which renders materialism and just the latest renaming of it "panpsychism" exactly ridiculous and absurd as what materialists disdain and despise as superstition and "folk psychology". Denying the reality of human consciousness makes all of the category distinctions that materialism relies on and values as meaningless as they hold religious belief is.
Both knowledge, and truth are aspects of consciousness. They are only meaningful the extent to which consciousness is real, as is everything that humans can articulate. Including error, including the lunacy of things like "neurophilosophy" and "eliminativism" which say more about the decadence that materialism has driven academic culture into than it does about our minds without that error. Considering what materialism is and inevitably leads to, there is no huge surprise when materialists such as Paul and Patricia Churchland drive philosphy into the absurd ditch they have. I don't think panpsychists, who are merely materialists under a different name and with a somewhat different approach are going to get it out of that ditch any time in the future. I think there is every reason for their position to be rejected on the basis of it being ridiculous. Finding it ridiculous is a perfectly respectable and intellectually justifiable reaction to what they claim.
All of the words used to identify or define all mental states are the product of those mental states, all of the words used to identify or define everything, including material objects, including forces in nature, including the words we use to talk about the experience of those and, certainly, our measurement and analysis of those are the product of our consciousness. You can't get any of it started without that consciousness, you can't, then, use those to dismiss the reality of the very thing that is doing all of what you're dismissing it with. And you can't advance on getting past that problem by merely screwing with the meaning of the words in order to get past the problem. And that is what the panpsychists do. Their ideology is materialist, it's just that they want to unknowably define the terms in a way so as to make the same kind of reductionist claims to get past the problem of consciousness but their attempts produce only an illusion of progress. In the end you have to admit that we are incapable of honestly attributing the human experience of consciousness to atoms and molecules without denying the thing we experience as our own consciousness.
* Not all of the people who do that are materialists. Descartes rather disgustingly and brutally disregarded the pain and suffering of the dogs he dissected alive even as their cries of pain were ringing in his ears. I think that tells us more about Descartes radical egomania and selfishness than it does about reality. Around the world people discount the pain and suffering and lives of animals in the most brutal of ways because of what they want. I don't think their view of people and behavior toward people they don't care about escapes that depravity. I don't think even their regard of and conduct to people they might think they love can be undamaged by that callousness. Nor do I think the end of materialism in amoral depravity will lead anywhere else, whether that materialism is of the vulgar sort as in Trump or the sophisticated kind taught at universities. The contented cattle on tenured faculties aren't where that depravity is most strongly demonstrated, it is in their students who go out of the university and into positions of power in the world.
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