reassembling the fragments
Fragmenting the Universe
Do you know any panpsychists? Probably not.
Those who claim to be panpsychists are better described by a grander sounding term - Reconstituted Fragmentalists.
Philosophers offering support for panpsychic views begin with a fundemental assumption that the Universe, both on a grand scale and in our immediate vicinity is intensely fragmented. Consequently their primary focus is to first claim, and then try to justify the claim that every identifiable isolated component of the percieved or detectable world has some form of perceptive consciousness.
That is quite a problem.
PUTTING THE CART - - - BEFORE THE HORSE
The statement in the green box above comes from the pansychism page of tearmaster.me. This discussion looks in greater detail at the confusion inherent in most discussion of panpsychism.
The problem faced by those supporting panpsychism is that they wish to give some form of consciousness to every item of existence without first committing to a unitary view. That is to say, they do not embrace an acceptance of the Universe as a single living entity, instead they seek to form a theory to explain how the parts of the world that show no obvious signs of consciousness do in fact hold that property.
By refering to the universe as a single living entity I am risking doing what I am about to suggest the panpsychists do, that is put the cart before the horse. Living, is the ever-present conscious awareness. Consciousness is not something of an evolutionary addition to a pre-created universe, it is not an addition, it is the fundamental creator.
There are those who criticise pansychism using the latest theories of the physics of matter to show an alleged futility to panpsychist arguments centred on quantum field theory having removed all possible "points of isolation" that would need localised consciousness.
By "points of isolation" I mean elementary quantum objects - electrons, sub-atomic particles, and anything given the status of fumdamental building blocks of matter. If such things have no elementary physical status, existing only as excitations of universally extensive quantum fields, then the panpychist has no fragments of the world on which to impose consciousness. That is, molecules, rocks, chairs and trees are products of the behaviour of universal quantum fields, and as such devoid of 'individuality'.
This is a well conveyed view point put forward by Bernardo Kastrup in his course introducing Analytic Idealism on the Essentia Foundation site on youtube, and can be viewed below-
PART THREE OF AN INTRODUCTION TO ANALYTIC IDEALISM.
Whilst the video above explains why panpychism is a viewpoint with explanatory difficulties I first wish to consider the term "Reconstituted Fragmentalists".
The world, the universe, the whole shebang, is not fragmented. The fragmentation arises in description, and in confrontation. We need to apportion different names to the objective appearances that surround us in order to communicate and describe what we experience. We confront what we recogise as associated parts of the pattern of creation, which have no stand-alone seperation, and impose a seperate existence by description.
Your body, for example, has the appearance of an independant structure that moves through its environment, yet in practice it is totally integrated into that environment and may quickly cease to be if parts of that enviroment go missing.