Panpsychism discussed

There's not much worth reading at Scientific American, I reckon, but I did enjoy this column about a recent meeting of science-y types debating panpsychism:

Is Consciousness Part of the Fabric of the Universe?

Physicists and philosophers recently met to debate a theory of consciousness called panpsychism 

As it happens, I agree that the basic criticisms are pretty strong:

Some point out that it doesn’t explain how small bits of consciousness come together to form more substantive conscious entities. Detractors say that this puzzle, known as the “combination problem,” amounts to panpsychism’s own version of the hard problem. The combination problem “is the serious challenge for the panpsychist position,” Goff admits. “And it’s where most of our energies are going.”

Others question panpsychism’s explanatory power. In his 2021 book Being You, neuroscientist Anil Seth wrote that the main problems with panpsychism are that “it doesn’t really explain anything and that it doesn’t lead to testable hypotheses. It’s an easy get-out to the apparent mystery posed by the hard problem.”

Perhaps I find these ideas more appealing:

Other ideas were batted around. The idea of cosmopsychism was floated—roughly, the notion that the universe itself is conscious. And Paul Draper, a philosopher at Purdue University who participated via Zoom, talked about a subtly different idea known as “psychological ether theory”—essentially that brains don’t produce consciousness but rather make use of consciousness. In this view, consciousness was already there before brains existed, like an all-pervasive ether. If the idea is correct, he writes, “then (in all likelihood) God exists.”

On cosmopsychism, it seems I missed this essay at AEON about it.  

All good fun to think about...

Update:  surprisingly, if you have Twitter and search it, there are a lot of comments being made about the article.  I liked this one, for example: