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What panpsychists should reject: on the incompatibility of panpsychism and organizational invariantism

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Abstract

Some philosophers, like David Chalmers, have either shown their sympathy for, or explicitly endorsed, the following two principles: Panpsychism—roughly the thesis that the mind is ubiquitous throughout the universe—and Organizational Invariantism—the principle that holds that two systems with the same (sufficiently) fine-grained functional organization will have qualitatively identical experiences. The purpose of this paper is to show the tension between the arguments that back up both principles. This tension should lead, or so I will argue, defenders of one of the principles to give up on the other.

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Notes

  1. This premise is not uncontroversial, see Dennett (1991), Dretske (1995), Lewis (1990).

  2. In his argument, Chalmers calls this second alternative 'Russellian Monism' or 'Type-F materialism.' In this paper I focus on panprotopsychism, a particular kind thereof, for two reasons. The first one is that most people accept that there is an interesting distinction to be drawn between conscious and non-conscious states, thereby ruling out the thesis that every entity in the actual world is conscious—as radical forms of panpsychism would hold. This makes, I think, panprotopsychism a more interesting option and one that more people will be willing to explore. The second one attends to expository purposes: panprotopsychism is a weaker thesis and if, as I argue in this paper, defenders of panprotopsychism should not endorse OI, defenders of stronger versions of panpsychism shouldn't either for similar reasons.

  3. As the functional description is satisfied all along the replacement (for the sake of the argument we can assume that the time required to replace one neuron can be as short as needed), if the cognitive system was not malfunctioning before, it will not be malfunctioning during the replacement process nor at the end of it.

  4. It can be confidently assumed, as Chalmers does, that “noticing” is one of the cognitive processes on which behavioral dispositions depend on, and hence, that there won't be a change in what S notices upon a change of the switch’s position.

  5. I am grateful to David Chalmers for suggesting me this possibility.

  6. Note that the commitment to the existence of supersimilar experiences is what leads many philosophers to reject disjunctivism about phenomenal character.

  7. Impressed by this work, Chalmers (2010, p. 24 fn.7) concedes that the dancing qualia argument is "something less than a reductio". He, nonetheless, endorses OI.

  8. Chalmers has noted that he is not moved by the dancing qualia anymore and some panpsychist might be willing to follow him in this respect. During discussion in the CO5, he contrasted the dancing qualia and the fading/absent qualia arguments noting that, no matter how large, dancing qualia cases require momentary errors, but that there is a good explanation of those errors in terms of the massive switching processes that takes place at that moment, whereas the fading qualia case "requires huge ongoing errors (a subject believing that their consciousness is just like mine when instead it contains, just a few bits)." It should be clear that the example can be easily modified to accommodate this worry: just let Cnopain connected to the rest of the brain; Marta will believe that she has a horrible headache when she has not.

  9. I am indebted to Hedda Hassel for discussion here.

  10. I am indebted to David Chalmers and Philip Goff for pressing me at this point.

  11. Note that we are, therefore, considering only inhabitants wsz whose brain is made entirely out of stings, such as Marta before the surgery. This way we guarantee that they entertain the same experiences as their counterparts.

  12. One might object that one might believe that E is the case and not be justified in believing H, if E is not justified—if one has come to believe that E is the case through wishful thinking for example. For that purpose on might restrict the claim above accordingly. I have preferred not to do it for the sake of simplicity in the exposition. Moreover, in my argument we are considering two individuals who have come to believe E in the very same way and my opponent accepts that the inhabitant of ws+ would be justified; therefore, so would be the one in wsz, at least insofar as the mechanism for acquiring the evidence is concerned.

  13. If one prefers a probabilistic account of evidence, then the principle should demand, at the very least, that there is no relevant world in which E is the case and the probability of H is not higher than the probability of not-H.

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Acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful to Axel Barceló, David Chalmers, Miguel Ángel Fernández, Eduardo García- Ramirez, Ekain Garmendia and Erick Llamas for useful discussion and comments on this paper. This paper was presented in the 5th Consciousness Online Conference (CO5) and at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Unidad Iztapalapa. I am very grateful to the audience of these events, and very especially to Richard Brown, David Chalmers, Philipp Goff, Hedda Hassel, Jorge Ornelas, Adam Pautz and Jonathan Simon for their detailed and thoughtful comments and discussion. Financial support for this work was provided by Conacyt (research project 166502), and the postdoctoral fellowship program in the UNAM.

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Sebastián, M.Á. What panpsychists should reject: on the incompatibility of panpsychism and organizational invariantism. Philos Stud 172, 1833–1846 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0394-9

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