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Panpsychism<br />
If conscious experience arises wherever there is information, a “difference that makes a<br />
difference”, then conscious experience is in a lot of places where we would not intuitively<br />
expect it to be. Does this constitute a reductio ad absurdam to Chalmers’ view? He approaches<br />
the difficulty as follows (293):<br />
There are two ways that a support of the information-based approach might react to this<br />
situation. The first and most obvious is to look for further constraints on the kind of informa-<br />
tion that is relevant to experience. Not just any physically realised information space is associ-<br />
ated with experience, but only those with certain properties… The alternative… is to bite the<br />
bullet and accept that all information is associated with experience. If so, then it is not just in-<br />
formation that is ubiquitous. Experience is ubiquitous too.<br />
In an endearingly-titled section, “What is it like to be a thermostat?” he describes the<br />
potential consequences of the second alternative (293):<br />
Certainly it will not be very interesting to be a thermostat. The information processing is so<br />
simple that we should expect the corresponding phenomenal states to be equally simple. There<br />
will be three primitively different phenomenal states, with no further structure.<br />
Discussion continues (293–301) and Chalmers avoids adopting a fixed position on the<br />
matter. The panpsychist consequences of his information theory may make it highly implau-<br />
sible to many readers but, like many other positions on the mind–body problem, panpsy-<br />
chism is irrefutable. Our lack of epistemic access to ‘other minds’ means that we will never<br />
be able to conclusively tell whether it is like anything to be a thermostat, a rock, or a hurri-<br />
cane. An objection along the lines of “but we have no reason to believe that rocks are con-<br />
scious” can be assuaged by replying that the only reason we have to believe that people are<br />
conscious is that each of us is one of them, so we infer from our own predicament of sen-<br />
tience to that of others. Once again, a high price is to be paid in aesthetic terms but the pos-<br />
sibility remains coherent.<br />
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