It’s only really your second paragraph that I disagree with. I’m a panpsychist, but I don’t often mention it because a lot of people take that to mean “I believe that everything in the universe has a mind, including rocks and stars”.
I go even further than you, though. I think that even of the materialists who aren’t accidental/secret property dualists, most of them are still dualists without realising it. The idea that there are physical objects which are related to one another causally is inherently dualist because it theorises two types of things in the universe—physical objects and causal relations. More importantly, the idea of physical objects as distinct from causal relationships is dodgy, because it opens us up to Humean skepticism: we never see the objects themselves, just detect them by their causal relationships to us, so how do we know what they’re actually like? All of the properties we associate with physical objects are products of their causal relationships with other matter, so separating the universe into physical things and causal relations paints us into the corner of believing in things which have no properties at all—a propertyless substrate a la the Scholastics.
The only hard and fast way to have a dualism-proof materialism that I’m comfortable with is to hold that objects are just clumps of causal relations. An electron isn’t a tiny little ball of substrate to which the properties of mass and charge and spin adhere, rather it’s just a likelihood that other particles in a given region will be affected by mass and charge and spin in an electron-like way. And that’s how I can be a panpsychist: all causal relations are equal. The only thing different about the ones in our heads is that they’re intricately interrelated in such a way that they’re self-referential, sensitively dependent on outside conditions, and persistent in a way that means that present interactions can recall interactions that happened years in the past (memory). The sensation of being alive is just what it feels like to be a really complex web of causal relations, and when this web reacts slightly to outside stimuli, that sensation changes slightly to, say, “the sensation of being alive and seeing the colour blue”. This is why I say that panpsychism isn’t the same as believing that rocks are conscious—consciousness is a special, complex type of causal relation, a sub-category into which inanimate objects don’t fit unless you spend a lot of time and energy constructing an AI out of them.
It’s only really your second paragraph that I disagree with. I’m a panpsychist, but I don’t often mention it because a lot of people take that to mean “I believe that everything in the universe has a mind, including rocks and stars”.
I go even further than you, though. I think that even of the materialists who aren’t accidental/secret property dualists, most of them are still dualists without realising it. The idea that there are physical objects which are related to one another causally is inherently dualist because it theorises two types of things in the universe—physical objects and causal relations. More importantly, the idea of physical objects as distinct from causal relationships is dodgy, because it opens us up to Humean skepticism: we never see the objects themselves, just detect them by their causal relationships to us, so how do we know what they’re actually like? All of the properties we associate with physical objects are products of their causal relationships with other matter, so separating the universe into physical things and causal relations paints us into the corner of believing in things which have no properties at all—a propertyless substrate a la the Scholastics.
The only hard and fast way to have a dualism-proof materialism that I’m comfortable with is to hold that objects are just clumps of causal relations. An electron isn’t a tiny little ball of substrate to which the properties of mass and charge and spin adhere, rather it’s just a likelihood that other particles in a given region will be affected by mass and charge and spin in an electron-like way. And that’s how I can be a panpsychist: all causal relations are equal. The only thing different about the ones in our heads is that they’re intricately interrelated in such a way that they’re self-referential, sensitively dependent on outside conditions, and persistent in a way that means that present interactions can recall interactions that happened years in the past (memory). The sensation of being alive is just what it feels like to be a really complex web of causal relations, and when this web reacts slightly to outside stimuli, that sensation changes slightly to, say, “the sensation of being alive and seeing the colour blue”. This is why I say that panpsychism isn’t the same as believing that rocks are conscious—consciousness is a special, complex type of causal relation, a sub-category into which inanimate objects don’t fit unless you spend a lot of time and energy constructing an AI out of them.