I know we have some smart folks with scientific and philosophical backgrounds on CF. I am curious what you make of Strawson's argument for why it makes sense that the physical is experiential. As you may know, Strawson is one of the foremost proponents of pansychism, which is the idea that experientiality (consciousness, experience, or mental) is fundamental to reality. Personally, I am curious, but unsure. I am still working through his argument.
What do you think? What do you find helpful/unhelpful about his argument?
I will give one quote for why he holds his position and then a quote of his basic argument. I will give a link to his paper at the bottom.
Why Strawson holds to pansychism:
"What do I mean by ‘(conscious) experience’ or ‘consciousness’? I mean what most people mean in the current debate. I’ll say more in §7. Before that I want to note one of the most implausible views of the fundamental nature of reality. This is the view held by many (I think most) in the West today, the view that psychism (and a fortiori panpsychism) is certainly false—that experience certainly isn’t one of the fundamental features of reality. Those who endorse this last view have to hold either that
(i) experience doesn’t really exist at all—that it is an illusion—
or
(ii) experience somehow ‘emerges’ from stuff that is in its fundamental nature wholly and utterly non-experiential.
Like many, I don’t think (ii) is tenable, because it requires that something known as radical emergence takes place in nature. Few, however, will deny that it looks preferable to (i). So it’s striking that many philosophers, unable to accept panpsychism or psychism, have in the last sixty years or so chosen (i) over (ii)."
One more important point that he tries to make, before presenting his basic argument:
"It’s worth saying straight away that there’s no conflict between panexperientialism and anything true in physics.
For while physics tells us a great deal about structural-relational features of reality, it has little to say about the intrinsic structure-transcendent nature of the stuff that has the structure (see §10)—where by ‘stuff’ I simply mean whatever it is (however insubstantial-seeming or fundamentally processual in nature) that gives the structural-relational features of reality their concrete existence. Physics is wholly open to the possibility that the intrinsic nature of the shimmering stuff it posits is consciousness or experientiality. Panexperientialism is accordingly wholly compatible with physicalism, when physicalism is properly understood (see §4)."
His basic argument for why reality is experiential (PP = physicalist panexperientialism):
"Most present-day physicalists assume that the ultimate intrinsic nature of physical stuff is non-experiential, and they further assume that this assumption is an essential part of physicalism. The first assumption has no obvious warrant in physics, and the second is therefore doubtful.
If one puts aside the standard use of the term ‘energy’ in physics to denote the power of doing work possessed by a body or system of bodies, one can adopt Heisenberg’s large metaphysical use of the term when he says that ‘energy is a substance’, and that ‘all particles are made of the same substance: energy’ (Heisenberg 1958: 63, 71). On this view, concrete stuff isn’t well thought of as something that is distinct from energy and that has energy. Rather concrete physical stuff is energy. This is one way to make a first step towards PP.
Given that concrete physical stuff = energy, we can ask the following question: What is the fundamental intrinsic structure-transcendent nature of this energy, this energy stuff? Physics doesn’t say (§10). We face the question whether it is non-experiential or experiential. PP points out [1] that we know for certain that there is experientiality, [2] that we don’t know for certain that there is any non-experiential reality, [3] that we have very strong reason to expect fundamental continuity of being or nature between the experiential reality we know for certain to exist and any other concrete reality there is, [4] that to suppose that the fundamental intrinsic nature of reality is wholly non-experiential requires one to posit ‘radical’ emergence of the experiential from the non-experiential. In the light of this it proposes that the most natural and parsimonious hypothesis is that all concrete reality is experiential."
There is a lot more to his argument that I am still working through (especially his misgivings for "radial emergence," which I know will be one of the misgivings some will have with his position). If you are interested, here is the link (I think you should be able to read it without logging in):
What does “physical” mean? Strawson
.... interesting thread by the way.
