[MD] atomic preferences and panexperientialism (panpyschism)

[david buchanan]

Ian said to dmb:
.., all you were really doing was holding up panpsychism as valid, whatever Birch's other defects.


dmb says:

Right. I'd never heard of the guy until Platt posted his name and the validity of panpsychism certainly does hinge on Birch. It doesn't hinge on Chalmers either. Obviously, I'd be far more interested in the panpsychism of Pierce, James, Dewey and Pirsig before anyone else's. This is MOQ discuss, after all. 


Ian said:
I think somewhere at root here you are trying to make a point about some kind of physical reductionism - and you see "emergence" as a word signalling that error - greedy reductionism as Dennett would say. The kind of reductionism that points out the physical explanations of material processes as the source of emergence, as if that explains all the bio-socio-intellectual patterns and processes too. (I take it as a given the MoQ tells us to look at patterns of value in all levels up to the situation in question.)


dmb says:
Yes and no. Yes, reductionism is the problem with Krimel's view and I've been saying that for a very long time. I don't have a problem with emergence, however, and I don't think it signals reductionism. Birch's point was that it's hard to see how mind can emerge from no-mind but if emergence is understood within a panpsychic view, then it's just a matter of complexity emerging out of simplicity. If mind and matter are two aspects of everything from the bottom up, then full blown reflective self-consciousness has not emerged from no-mind. It just means that mind has been evolving from the very beginning and it was never not there. So emergence and panpsychism can go quite nicely together.
But yes, it is reductionism that is the problem. Chalmers is convinced that some kind of non-reductionistic answer to the hard problem of consciousness and that it will never, in principle, be explainable in physical terms.  His critique of physicalism is an attack on reductionism. 

I don't know what the difference is between reductionism and greedy reductionism, but my hunch is that Dennett is defending his own reductionism with that distinction. Care to explain?