How Panpsychism Can Explain Consciousness | Rupert Sheldrake

[Music] what is conscious well I mean there's certain fast question the code I think consciousness is the realm of possibility and you can't know about possibilities unless they're in a conscious space I think Minds are containers of possibility possibilities are not physical facts they're just possibilities and they can only exist in something like an imagination so I think our conscious mind so you know that's what they do they're to do with choices among possibilities our unconscious minds are about habits things that we just do automatically we don't need to think about them and I think all minds really are spaces of possibility even the mind underlying the cosmos so I think that think of Minds in general as conscious spaces or realms or containers of possibility units on the road there - oh I'm propensity ISM I just think those pentakus don't go far enough oh those Penn psychos talk about the consciousness or minds of electrons or protons or and assumes and things like that which is fine the reason they do that is because they're trying to explain how we come to be conscious standard materialism is the doctrine that matters unconscious the whole universe is unconscious and then they have the problem okay everything's unconscious and everything's made of matter including our brains how come we're conscious so they only have to say well the consciousness somehow emerges out of complex arrangements but how can something totally different from unconscious matter emerge that's called the hard problem in the philosophy of mind so to get out of that some pants cyclists some materialists have become pants cyclists by saying okay well let's have a little bit of consciousness in electrons and atoms and things so consciousness can emerge from something that has a much much lower of mind or consciousness even in subatomic particles and therefore we can overcome the problem of how something different in that it's a difference of degree not a difference in kind the emergence of consciousness in human brains so I think that's fine I don't have a problem with that but the question I then asked them is well what about the Sun the Sun is a self-organizing system what does the Sun think about what's the mind of the Sun like I'm personally I think the sun's conscious and indeed the entire galaxy and the whole universe so I'm in favor of pan psychism but pan means everywhere psyche means mind I'm in favor of pen sarcasm I just think it's so much too limiting to confine it to the realm of subatomic physics so this is not an emergent property of well emergent property I mean what does it mean it means that something comes from something that wasn't there before it's a way of conjuring something out of like a rabbit out of a hat you see there are three main ways of thinking about it one is top-down the whole universe is conscious and even before there was any matter there was consciousness or mind and the evolution of matter in the universe is the the universe has lower and lower levels of consciousness as it evolves the Big Bang the entire universe is one system one mind as it were then the fields of physics and things separate art and stars and galaxies and whatnot so then you have the emergence of many forms of consciousness and then on life a life on Earth you have they I dare say in biology there is an emergence of higher forms of consciousness I mean we have more than a worm or a bacterium so in that area in then you could say that there is a kind of emergence but the top-down consciousness means you start with consciousness and it goes down from the bar as it were the bottom-up materialist theory is you start from subatomic particles and atoms and you work your way up and then you have said well it emerges but you could just as well say it descends the third position is say well it's both there's a sense in which there's a an emergency or an appearance of high levels of complexity with more complexity but it's not that it was not there before and after all our evolution has happened within on the planet Earth within a galaxy and what if the whole galaxy and what if the whole solar system are conscious and what if Gaia the earth is conscious then our consciousness has appeared within much larger conscious systems so you know these are philosophically different ways of looking at it there's a prejudice in modern science in favor of materialism and reductionism and bottom-up explanations but that's really a kind of philosophical fashion it's not the truth well it's been the fashion since the late 19th century's science became dominated by materialism in the late 19th century and in many ways our views of matter have changed since then they had an old classical physics view of matters little atoms as little billiard balls quantum theory changes that very radically and they didn't know about the galaxies beyond our own or the Big Bang or modern cosmology so all these things have changed but the philosophy of materialism swatted locked in a 19th century worldview and of course you can have an updated materialism and in a sense pants cyclists are trying to update materialism but as soon as you admit psyche or mind into matter then it's not really materialism it's really a form of animism animism is the belief that whole of nature is alive and they hold universes like an organism not a machine I think that's a much more reasonable view of myself so what we're at the moment in is a kind of conflict between old-style materialism and the kind of animism Orpen psychism struggling to get out and so far it's only got as far as atoms and molecules but one reason I like to ask pentakus about the consciousness of the song is that I think they're on a slippery slope and I'd like to push them down it a bit fast and they go on their own and discussing the consciousness of the Sun is a very good way of accelerating this slide down the slippery slope into a full-blown animism it seems to me like there's a what was what was the basic definition of consciousness then what is this thing that the materialists and well I mean there's hundreds of definitions but it's to do with awareness and as I said to start with possibility I that's my own definition it's about a realm of possibility they would say it's about perception awareness algorithms in the brain you know as soon as you get into modern cognitive neuroscience then the brain is a computer consciousness is just the software programs running it but they of course needn't be conscious in fact they're not conscious so in the materialist philosophy of mind consciousness is either an epiphenomenon that does nothing like a kind of shadow of physical activity in the brain that has no role and has no free well it doesn't actually do anything that's the majority of you or else it's an illusion produced by brains because it might have some conceivable evolutionary advantage but it still doesn't do anything the problem is that to call consciousness an illusion doesn't explain it it presupposes it because illusion is itself a made of consciousness so philosophers of mind and the materialist school go round and round in circles like dogs chasing their tails trying to explain it never succeed and any one of them comes up with a theory another one will point out the flaws and they come up with their own and the other one will point out the flaws in it and that's why it's called the very existence of consciousness is called the hard problem it seems to me one major part of that is just the limit of language of word to adequately describe a phenomena the way I think this the heart problem is will show many things one of it is just how limited English or languages to describe them stuff I don't think the problem the consciousness is a problem at language I mean language itself of course is a product of consciousness and languages inadequate to explain many things including the ultimate nature of reality at the beginning of the universe and so forth but I don't think that the problem is with language I think the problem is with worldviews and do you have a worldview that's essentially an atheist materialist worldview there is no God there is no consciousness out there the universe is unconscious it's purposeless meaningless everything's happened by chance or accident the laws of nature have no particular reason to be one way or the other we just live in a universe where they happen to be right for us evolution is a matter of blind chance mutations and blind natural selection that's a worldview that says that consciousness has just emerged in our brains and doesn't actually do anything also that we don't have free will a deeply depressing worldview and I think that when you have whole societies based on it like ours what you'd predict is that lots of people would suffer from depression and the facts actually bear that out if you think you live in a meaningless world where your mind is just in your brain and it's nothing more than what's happening inside your head not truly related to anything else deeply depressing whereas if you think that consciousness is primary that we live in a universe that's purposeful that our minds are part of something much greater than ourselves that mystical experiences connect us with greater Minds than our own they're not just serotonin levels changing inside our brains then you have a completely different view of the universe it's not just a matter of language for more debates talks and interviews subscribe today to the Institute of Arts and ideas at IAI TV you

Channel: The Institute of Art and Ideas

Views: 45,338

Keywords: conciousness, minds, rupert sheldrake, ways to go beyond, the science delusion, the hard problem of conciousness, parasychology, morphic resonance, spiritual practice, spirituality, depression, meaning, materialism, unconcious, sun, science, philosophy of mind, mind of the sun, concious sun, concious, dualism, body and mind, perception, language and reality, higher forms of conciousness, quantum theory, cosmology, animism, what is conciousness, panpsychism

Id: 2xTzwLulRAA

Length: 11min 8sec (668 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 09 2019