Walden Pod Emerson Green

“On panpsychism, how can there ever be unconsciousness, like in the case of dreamless sleep?” As far as objections go, this is a pretty weak one, but I decided to take the opportunity to talk about death, sleep, states of unconsciousness, and how panpsychists see the mind and its place in nature. 

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Philip Goff and Dustin Crummett debate psychophysical harmony, God, axiarchism, pan-agentialism, natural teleology, and explore some neglected terrain between theism and the hypothesis of indifference. What are our options in explaining the fine-tuning of consciousness? 

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Mind Chat

Music by ichika Nito & Whalers. Used with permission.

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When did consciousness first evolve? If physicalism is true, we’d expect it to have evolved gradually, just as other complex biological phenomena evolved gradually. But the transition from feeling nothing to feeling something couldn’t have been gradual. No matter how minimal a conscious experience is, if it’s “like something” to exist – anything at all – it’s not like nothing at all. On reflection it seems hard to imagine anything other than a sharp border between non-experiential reality and experiential reality. On the other hand, complex physical states are not sharp: they admit borderline cases. If we remove one atom at a time from a given brain state, it will eventually be vague or indeterminate whether or not the organism is still in that physical brain state. So if consciousness is just a kind of physical state, we’d expect consciousness to follow suit. Since it seems impossible that there could be a borderline case of consciousness – it’s either like something for a creature or like nothing – we have reason to think that physicalism is false. 

Michael Tye - Vagueness and the Evolution of Consciousness

David Papineau’s review of Vagueness and the Evolution of Consciousness in NDPR

Nino Kadic - Phenomenology of Fundamental Reality

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Music by ichika Nito and used with permission.

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Twitter @waldenpod @OnPanpsychism

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/ timestamps /
00:00 The vagueness argument
04:18 Which creatures are conscious?
06:18 The sharpness of consciousness
10:09 The vagueness of biological phenomena
12:41 The sharpness of consciousness (cont.)
20:14 Weak emergence
21:42 The advantage of vagueness arguments

In many ways, I'm the ideal audience for apologists of capital punishment. I believe in free will, I think human beings are responsible for their actions, I’m not opposed to retribution in all cases, I believe there are virtuous qualities to revenge, and I think some people deserve to die. However, none of that is enough to justify the death penalty system. 

First, arguing that some people deserve to die is not sufficient to show that any particular institution (e.g. the state) should have the power and legitimacy to carry out executions. Second, capital punishment is not reconcilable with the principle of remedy: when mistakes are inevitably made, the punishment for the wrongly convicted cannot be brought to an end and they cannot be given damages. Third, the application of the death penalty will inevitably be morally arbitrary in some cases – either due to the morally arbitrary nature of the laws themselves, the enforcement of the law, or the imperfect determination of guilt. Since this is unavoidable, we cannot have the death penalty without murdering innocents. And since saving innocent life is far more important than ending the lives of the guilty, this should dissuade us from maintaining a death-penalty system. Finally, the virtuous qualities of revenge are absent in the death penalty system.

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Support at patreon.com/waldenpod & patreon.com/counter

YouTube

Transcript

Listen to our sister show, Counter Apologetics here

Music by ichika Nito and used with permission.

Twitter @waldenpod

linktr.ee/emersongreen

Subscribe on YouTube

Consider supporting the show on Patreon here or Counter Apologetics here

Listen to our sister show, Counter Apologetics here

Music by ichika Nito and used with permission.

Full interview on the Sentientism podcast

Twitter @waldenpod @OnPanpsychism

linktr.ee/emersongreen

Subscribe on YouTube

Consider supporting the show on Patreon here or Counter Apologetics here

Listen to our sister show, Counter Apologetics here

Music by ichika Nito and used with permission.

Full interview on the Sentientism podcast

Twitter @waldenpod @OnPanpsychism