[MD] Social level for humans only

[david buchanan]

dmb said:
The MOQ says that even subatomic particles can express preferences....  and greater and greater degrees of consciousness unfold throughout the whole evolutionary  process.



Dave T replied:
So what you are proposing as your theory of reality is that quarks are conscious? What next? Equal rights for quarks? What about gay quarks getting married? 


dmb says:

No, Dave. That is NOT what I'm saying. The only thing you've done in this response is prop up the same ridiculous straw man that Krimel uses. 


Krimel's Straw man #3) atoms are decision makers  
Your ongoing defense of Pirsig you have consistently defended his use of "preference" as an alternative to "cause".


dmb's actual position #3)

You anthropomorphize the behavior of inorganic patterns in a way that Pirsig would never endorse and neither would anyone else. The actual idea is that it makes more sense to think of the "laws" of physics in a less mechanistic way. And of course with the way the field is these days, the probability of needing a quantum leap in re-conceptualizing these "laws" is very high.

This is also the view that Chalmers entertains and it is the view that James arrived at, by the way. It's called panpsychism. Here's a brief description from Weaki:

Panpsychism, in philosophy, is either the view that all parts of matter involve mind, or the more holistic view that the whole Universe is an organism that possesses a mind (see pandeism, pantheism, panentheism and cosmic consciousness). It is thus a stronger and more ambitious view than animism or hylozoism, which holds only that all things are alive. This is not to say that panpsychism believes that all matter is alive or even conscious but rather that the constituent parts of matter are composed of some form of mind and are sentient.
Panpsychism claims that everything is sentient and that there are either many separate minds, or one single mind that unites everything that is. The concept of the unconscious, made popular by the psychoanalysts, made possible a variant of panpsychism that denies consciousness from some entities while still asserting the ubiquity of mind.
Panexperientialism, as espoused by Alfred North Whitehead, is a less bold variation, which credits all entities with phenomenal consciousness but not with cognition, and therefore not necessarily with fully-fledged minds.
Panprotoexperientialism is a more cautious variation still, which credits all entities with non-physical properties that are precursors to phenomenal consciousness (or phenomenal consciousness in a latent, undeveloped form) but not with cognition itself, or with conscious awareness.