Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

TagPanpsychism (why a growing trend)

cells-under-a-microscope-cell-division-cellular-therapy-3d-illustration-on-a-dark-background-stockpack-adobe-stock.jpg
Cells under a microscope. Cell division. Cellular Therapy. 3d illustration on a dark background

Cognitive Cells? A Newer Challenge to Neo-Darwinism

The origin of self-referential cognition is unknown, say a trio of researchers who call it “biology’s most profound enigma”

In September 1957, Nobel Prize-winning biophysicist Francis Crick (1916–2004) announced the “Central Dogma” in biology, at a symposium at Oxford University. The dogma is currently given in the Biology Dictionary thus: “genetic information flows primarily from nucleic acids in the form of DNA and RNA to functional proteins during the process of gene expression.” This view that genes rule underpins mainstream assumptions about how traits are inherited; from there, it governs accepted assumptions about evolution. So the ground on which Darwin’s modern defenders stand, propounding the only true history of life, is narrow but it is firm. Sir Francis Crick is perhaps better known to laypeople for his 1994 book, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for Soul, which he Read More ›

Girls eye with paint and earth
Girls eye with paint and earth

Why Panpsychism Is Starting To Push Out Naturalism

A key goal of naturalism/materialism has been to explain human consciousness away as “nothing but a pack of neurons.” That can’t work

Naturalism, often called “materialism,” posits that nature is all there is. Panpsychism doesn’t dispute that. But the panpsychist also thinks that consciousness is real — present in all nature (or all living nature) but especially developed in humans. Last Monday, writing about a classical atheist naturalist who was attacking panpsychism, I reflected on the difficulties the trend to panpsychism presents him. The naturalist is hostile to the panpsychist because he assumes that human consciousness will, in due course, be explained away. It is either an illusion, or an aid to survival that evolved among early humans. Or perhaps it is a spandrel (in evolution theory, a useless accompaniment of useful traits). In short, what we thought was our means of Read More ›