Panpsychism Isn't An Advance On Old Line Materialists Attacking Their "Hard Problem" Panpsychism Doesn't Make A Dent In It Either - A Response

One of the most often heard slogans among atheists is the likely apocryphal line attributed to the mathematician and physicist, Laplace,  Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là, which atheists say meant he had no need of the idea that God was the origin of the natural phenomena that Laplace described.  "Having no need of God" in studying an aspect of physical universe is supposed to mean God disappears.  Which makes about as much sense as saying that having no need of chocolate when making pickles requires the belief that chocolate doesn't exist.  "Having no need of" something has never made it disappear.

Apparently there is no actual witness to the conversation between Laplace and Napoleon who attributed that line to Laplace, those who place it in his mouth all had an ideological motive in doing so.  And one of his younger colleagues and eulogist, François Arago, said that when Laplace was made aware that something like that statement was going to be attributed to him, he wanted the claim he'd ever said that refuted.  Like other ideologues, atheists seldom let the truth get in the way of their cherished myths.

The idea that atoms are conscious as a means of atheist-materialists trying to rescue their ideology from the ever more apparent fact that the human experience of consciousness cannot be convincingly explained as a material effect by attributing consciousness to atoms and molecules and larger physical structures is a nifty way to bypass that hard problem*.   It is not, it doesn't even get you past the problems of the vulgar materialism of the most benighted kind being unable to explain the consciousness which enables us to experience and observe the material universe, the very consciousness which, in a way that even our own physical bodies don't seem to be ARE WHAT WE ARE.

As I said this proposed atomic consciousness, whatever else you can say about it, would not appear to be nearly like human consciousness.  It doesn't result in the same range of variable behavior that human consciousness does, even any statistical account of variation in behavior is far more predictable than human behavior is in reality - though the corner cutting, dismissal of outliers, willful narrowing of focus, and everything up to and including the widespread file drawer effect of sociology and psychology produce an academically accepted illusion of a manageable statistical range.  That is it's acceptable until its methodology is rigorously challenged, then it crumbles.  The same can happen when the experiment is run again.

The human experience of consciousness - at least my experience of it - is that it is singular, not that it is built of components, any supposed component parts of it are aspects of that same unity which can change.  The same consciousness can change its ideas, those things which it holds and it will still be experienced as the same unity.  I would  have to say that looking at videos of bacteria responding to light by moving towards it seems to me to demonstrate the same experience of a unified sense of self which is what consciousness, at bottom, or at least any foundation of it we can access, seems to consist of. It is my experience of consciousness, despite the many changes in me over decades of experience.

Just how this "atomic consciousness" gives rise to any unified "higher consciousness" which would be proposed for molecules and crystals and, heaven help us, as found in human beings and whatever other creatures the atheist-materialist wants to attribute consciousness to, is no real advance on merely insisting that what is genuinely called consciousness in human beings is a mere epiphenomenon of physical causation. Though it is superior to eliminative materialism, than which I think there are few ideas inferior.

For materialism to fail, you don't need to create consciousness for atoms and adding it only confirms that materialism can't account for consciousness.  Panpsychism as a means of explaining human consciousness is just a short-term, illusory gain, buying time for the denial of the failure of materialism.  For anyone to deny the material nature of consciousness, that consciousness is a material object, they have no need to refute that hypothesis because its necessity can't be demonstrated.  It looks like a desperate move to me.

* It's only hard if you insist, beforehand on making it come out as a prop for materialism.  If you accept that consciousness isn't a material thing then it ceases to be a problem though it remains what it is, a mystery that can't be solved out of out experience of material substance.


Update:  It's easy.  If you're going to claim that not needing to reference God to explain the interactions of the planets with the sun and each other means that God doesn't exist, what physical relationship that is observable in atoms necessitates reference to their alleged consciousness?

I do find it hilarious that atheists think that because they can't discern the hand of God intervening to alter the "laws of science" in the motions of physical objects that means God isn't there.   According to Genesis, the very first sentence in the Bible, God created the entire universe including whatever forces those "laws of science" describe.  If that's true then those "laws of science" they can't observe God tinkering with are laws God made, they would be God's laws.  So there would be just as much reason for a believer to expect that since, as it says in Genesis, God found his creation good that he wouldn't see any reason to tinker with them on a regular basis.  I mean, if the order of nature is impressive it's certainly a better made "machine" than any that human beings can come up with.  They're thinking too much like human beings in expecting that God would tinker with the work that God did well, we're the ones who screw up.  That doesn't, though, preclude that God might intervene, rarely, as miracles, by definition, are rare, in ways that would not be amenable to statistical analysis or even common experience.  It does mean you couldn't necessarily do science about them.