... we do need to keep in mind everything that we actually do know. This is one of the reasons why I reject materialism in favor of something like panpsychism.
Interesting - it seems to me that what we know indicates materialism
rather than panpsychism...
Because treating life like a particularly complex form of non-life works up until our weird new non-life becomes aware of the world around it. Then you've got an unbridgeable gulf unless you change the way you think about non-life altogether.
Depends what you mean by 'aware' - there's a sense in which a thermostat is 'aware' of temperature (i.e. it responds to changes in temperature). But I presume you mean
conscious awareness.
... we do know that consciousness at some point emerges, so it seems only logical to me that there must be something about the building blocks of matter that would make subjective rather than merely objective existence possible at all.
I think a major part of the difficulty people have with consciousness is the intuitive feeling that the conscious mind is somehow something extra; that it "drives the body around like a soccer mom driving an SUV", as Sean Carroll memorably said. The sense that the physical body just another object and one's conscious mind is something else that
has subjective experience is hard to shake; but consciousness
is subjective experience, an intermittent process running in the brain of a physical body, much as digestion is a process running in the gut of a physical body.
Having conscious awareness is
what it is like (in the Nagelian sense) to be a particular creature with a brain that is running those processes. The subjectivity of subjective experience is the fact that only
your brain in
your body runs and has access to those processes. Each of us is isolated in our subjectivity, only able to communicate our subjective experience via metaphor - via comparisons with objective experiences in the world, hoping that the other's subjective experience is similar -
because the mind is what the brain does, and each brain is unique.
All the neurological evidence I'm aware of (!) points to this interpretation, and all the physics I'm aware of indicates there is no other plausible mechanism [details available on request].
If you ask why it is that there is 'something that it is like' to be a creature with a brain running certain processes, I can only say that there are plenty of plausible models (e.g. Doug Hofstadter's book 'I Am A Strange Loop' highlights a basic principle), but I don't see how there can be an objective explanation for subjective experience beyond 'that is what happens when these objective criteria are met'. It presumably evolved because it was advantageous - it correlates with niches requiring flexible behaviour, planning and foresight, and involving complex social interaction.
... from a naturalistic perspective, it seems like you'd need to switch over to a more integrated view of reality to actually account for everything that we know exists.
More integrated
how? Can you explain?
