Why not assume physicalism?

[Patterner]

Meaning, why bother with ideas like panpsychism?

In The Conscious Mind, David Chalmers writes:

Why should there be conscious experience at all? It is central to a subjective viewpoint, but from an objective viewpoint it is utterly unexpected. Taking the objective view, we can tell a story about how fields, waves, and particles in the spatiotemporal manifold interact in subtle ways, leading to the development of complex systems such as brains. In principle, there is no deep philosophical mystery in the fact that these systems can process information in complex ways, react to stimuli with sophisticated behavior, and even exhibit such complex capacities as learning, memory, and language. All this is impressive, but it is not metaphysically baffling. In contrast, the existence of conscious experience seems to be a new feature from this viewpoint. It is not something that one would have predicted from the other features alone.

That is, consciousness is surprising. If all we knew about were the facts of physics, and even the facts about dynamics and information processing in complex systems, there would be no compelling reason to postulate the existence of conscious experience. If it were not for our direct evidence in the first-person case, the hypothesis would seem unwarranted; almost mystical, perhaps.

In Until the End of Time, Brian Greene wrote:

And within that mathematical description, affirmed by decades of data from particle colliders and powerful telescopes, there is nothing that even hints at the inner experiences those particles somehow generate. How can a collection of mindless, thoughtless, emotionless particles come together and yield inner sensations of color or sound, of elation or wonder, of confusion or surprise? Particles can have mass, electric charge, and a handful of other similar features (nuclear charges, which are more exotic versions of electric charge), but all these qualities seem completely disconnected from anything remotely like subjective experience. How then does a whirl of particles inside a head—which is all that a brain is—create impressions, sensations, and feelings?

We know a good deal about the physical particles, structures, and processes going on in the brain. The physical can explain all the things Chalmers and Greene mention. But that's all they explain. No neuroscientist will point to Structure 1, Process A, Impulse Alpha, etc., and say, "And that is how consciousness is produced. It is those combination of elements that makes it happen."

And no being studying all of that will conclude that we are conscious. No physical properties and processes describe or explain anything other than the physical properties and processes.

It all explains how we, for example, distinguish different frequencies of the spectrum within a certain range, beginning with photons entering our eyes. Just as we can describe how mechanical things we have made so the same thing. It doesn't explain how the clump off physical matter inside our skulls have subjective experience or awareness.

[Dime]

Most people don’t begin as physicalists, and indeed even most physicalists don’t have the implicit ontological understanding of physicalism, because they haven’t attempted to grapple with the problem of consciousness from the materialists perspective.

Or if they do, they tend to wave their hands of the problem and obfuscate that any problem exists, and so live in ignorance, of their own implicit understanding of their experience.

Without interrogating your own experience you cannot begin to even grapple with the question of consciousness, firstly because you are completely overlooking who is the one that’s looking.

Most physicalists believe they are the brain.

They are completely identified (their identity is tied to) their mentation and thoughts, so they have no ability to step back from their own mind and objectively observe thought happening in their mind.

If they were able to do that, if they would take a real interest in consciousness, they would then realise that the thoughts that occur in their heads seem to appear, and when they aren’t observing their own experiences they are completely identified with that mental stream of consciousness.

Secondly, they are identified with their intentions.

They haven’t observed their minds enough to realise that intentions simply appear, with or without their input.

So if they were to start observing their own minds like this they would start to wonder what is observing the contents of consciousness.

Once that happens, their worldview of materialism is shattered.

Because they assume that they are in the world, they assume they are the physical body.

But when they observe their own minds, they might realise that the world is in them. Then they might have to question what they are, and what consciousness is.

That doesn’t mean they would have to completely give up all the physicalist theories, just that they would be placed in their proper order or hierarchy of primacy.