Pan psychism is a clumsy way of recognizing the need for final and formal causality in nature. And it seems less whimsical once one considers that our knowledge of final causality in nature has its roots in our self knowledge, i.e., our knowledge of self as agent. For both an Aristotelian and a pan-psychist might agree (albeit for different reasons) that lower-than-human entities are, in a sense, diminished versions of human agents.
This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level. No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies. None of them thinks about the whole as such. And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist). None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well? And why not parts of these parts, et...
Comments