Argues that materialism is unscientific nonsense relying on magical thinking and that panpsychism is the only available rational explanation for the emergence of complex experience.
Panpsychism is the idea that the building blocks of matter are capable of experience (consciousness). Below is what appears to be the simplest proof ever devised, advocating for the reality of panpsychism.
The prevailing view amongst scientists is that of materialism. Materialism claims that matter is fundamental, and that all things, including experience, result from material interactions with material things. But materialists cannot explain how experience emerges from non-experiencing matter. In other words, materialists believe that experience strongly emerges from matter.
Strong emergence is the belief that new phenomena can arise in a system that cannot be explained in terms of the systems components. Weak emergence on the other hand, is the belief that new phenomena that arise in a system are explainable in terms of the system’s components. By definition, strong emergence can never ever be justified with physical evidence since any uncovered evidence would now make the emergent phenomena weakly emergent. So strong emergence appears to be wholly unscientific and in effect a myth, indistinguishable from magic.
In direct contrast to materialists, panpsychists assume that complex experience in a system is explainable in terms of the simpler experience possessed by the components of the system. In other words, panpsychists seem complex experience as weakly emerging from simple experience. Panpsychists don’t invent a magical explanation, they merely assume complex experience weakly emerges in the same way that all other complex physical phenomena weakly emerge from simpler physical phenomena.
Proof Summary
1. Materialism assumes strong emergence of experience.
2. Strong emergence is a wholly unjustifiable myth, so materialism too is a myth.
3. Weak emergence occurs everywhere you look.
4. Only panpsychism assumes complex experience weakly emerges from simple experience.
C. Therefore only panpsychism is a justifiable rational (scientific) explanation for the evolution of experience.