Panpsychism, Intuitions, and the Great Chain of BeingLuke Roelofs (University of Toronto)
October 31, 2016, 10:15am - 12:15pm
Clayton, Monash University
E561, Menzies, 5th Floor
Monash University
Clayton 3800
Australia
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- Abstract: Panpsychism - the view that all matter is conscious - is undergoing a renewal of interest among analytic philosophers of mind. However, panpsychism radically violates a widespread pattern of intuitions about what things do and don’t have consciousness, a pattern which I will label the ‘great chain of being’ intuition: humans are definitely conscious, vertebrate animals probably conscious, other animals maybe conscious, other organisms probably not conscious, and inanimate things definitely not conscious. Moreover, insofar as a being’s consciousness is important to the morality of our treatment of it, panpsychism threatens to de-stabilise our moral practices. Faced with this conflict between theory and apparent ‘common sense’, how should a philosopher proceed? I consider four approaches to the conflict, arguing for an option that partially vindicates but partially debunks the ‘great chain of being’ intuition.
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