Kai
New
I think you're underestimating the combination problem. Why should qualia be divisible, when one of the primary reasons the Hard Problem is hard is that we have qualitative experiences for whom a reductionist model cannot even be sketched out?
I don't necessarily think that contexts of experience are divisible. For example, to see color, I maintain that you need a physical system complex enough for that kind of experience to operate. But that doesn't mean it's divisible. It doesn't mean, for example, than an electron can "see," let alone see color. Indeed, I would find such a claim largely incoherent. I just think that something like an electron has a much more basic texture of experience. Of course it doesn't have taste and smell and those things, because it is not a system complex enough to sponsor those experiential activities. Just as we are not complex enough to sponsor activities that may yet exist in the future of evolution.
As for first person perspectives of primitive entia, why would we think they have first person experiences? And why would their interaction make a new first person entity? Experiences happen to a first person macro-entity, intentionality is also focused on similar beings (us humans at the least). Neither seems amenable to reductionism, though on the flip-side neither seems wholly divorced from physical biological beings. To suddenly claim that something like consciousness, which is first-person centric, is somehow spread across the universe (a claim by both Panpyshcism and Idealism) seems like a huge leap to me. Adding a "proto" prefix only confuses the matter further. What exactly is "proto-consciousness"? Is it like sleep, like being in a daze? What good reason do we have to believe there is such a thing?
Well, that's a circular reasoning: "experiences happen to a first person macro-entity." So far as I see it, there's no good reason to suppose that a level of experience cannot be had by every single existing system in this universe. To imagine that we are the only style of it has always struck me as profoundly anthropomorphic. The secular equivalent of theism, I guess. I also don't know what you mean by "spread across the universe." To take a simple case, basic materials are "spread across the universe" and if those are experiential systems (as I think they are) then they are likewise spread, being cospatial with the first.
Panpsychism, while having its charms, ultimately seems like a way to force an answer to huge mysteries by mashing together the mental and physical and claiming the problems of subjectivity/intentionality/rationality are solved.
I think that's Idealism you are talking about. Of course, any philosophical standpoint can be questioned. However, a couple of misconceptions in your statement: NM doesn't "mash stuff together." The world consists of one "grokness" under NM. Strawson calls it panpsychism, and that's his choice, but really his view and mine are essentially identical (so far as I can see).
I think all the paradigms are fundamentally flawed, though materialism is last place for me given the ex nihilo miracle it requires. Perhaps "souls" are the wrong word, though the above issues combined with the issue of where memories are "located" makes me think it would be unfair to say Panpsychism is necessarily superior to Idealism or Dualism. (I'm also sympathetic to some of Scholastic Metaphysics and Hylemorphism, though I think it's also a dead end. If I ever comprehend Whitehead I might go in for process philosophy...)
Well, as I said, Idealism does not give an answer for why world-stuff is the way we perceive it and has the properties it does. It also, in its form of propsing "mind" as the basis of things, if it genuinely means mind and not a bare experientiality, is guilty of massive undemonstrated assumptions, imo. Principally, the assumption that structured experiential activity can exist in the absence of physical structure. If it's really that physical structure that it's talking about, then it is in fact NM or PP.
Perhaps Panpsychism should drop the "Pan". Think of some core capable of experience and intentionality that need not tie into survival of individual living beings. These cores may simply be part of living biological systems and recycled in a genuine physical space rather than a God-dream - basically another part of the environment without extending mental properties to every bit of matter.
I think that just reinstantiates the problem of radical emergence, which is precisely where NM is superior to most other standpoints