Panpsychism - Argument For Panpsychism

Argument For Panpsychism

In his book titled Mortal Questions, Thomas Nagel defines panpsychism as, "the view that the basic physical constituents of the universe have mental properties," effectively claiming the panpsychist thesis to be a type of property dualism. Nagel argues that panpsychism follows from four premises:

(1) "Material composition", or commitment to materialism. (2) "Nonreductionism", or the view that mental properties cannot be reduced to physical properties. (3) "Realism" about mental properties. (4) "Nonemergence", or the view that "there are no truly emergent properties of complex systems".

Nagel notes that new physical properties are discovered through explanatory inference from known physical properties; following a similar process, mental properties would seem to derive from properties of matter not included under the label of "physical properties", and so they must be additional properties of matter. Also, he argues that, "the demand for an account of how mental states necessarily appear in physical organisms cannot be satisfied by the discovery of uniform correlations between mental states and physical brain states." Furthermore, Nagel argues mental states are real by appealing to the inexplicability of subjective experience, or qualia, by physical means.

Many arguments for panpsychism claim physicalism is incapable of accounting for subjective experience or qualia. Also, the problems found with emergentism are often cited by panpsychists as grounds to reject physicalism. In answering the question of the self-awareness of matter, the nature of the base unit for life becomes the intersection of empirical reasoning and metaphysics. The ability to be animated, to have breath, and a living soul; presents itself as the base criterion for this estimation. The attribution of qualities to elementary atoms is subjectively speculative and considered unscientific; aside from the atomic paradigms of molecular structure. An aboriginal atom of consciousness may be the result of an emergent cogent unity rather than an innate advantage towards perception. Panpsychist theory suggests an elemental variation in the substance of thoughts with a qualitative perspective. In exploring the mechanics of the mind, Panpsychism asks the question: How was mind born out of matter? Further, ...how was mathematics born out of the mind?; as an abstract form that describes perfectly the properties of the physical world. This process would not have emerged without some mechanical awareness, as a product of thought independent of experience, rather, sensuously as with the empirical heuristic.