Abstract
This chapter questions the reductionist assumption that bits of lifeless matter must have grouped themselves into complex patterns that eventually became living conscious beings. There is no decisive reason to question Peirce’s suggestion that mind came first and that mechanical causality emerges when regions of a fundamentally conscious universe settle into deterministic habits. If we define consciousness in a way that ignores clearly accidental properties such as looking and behaving like us, some form of panpsychism is not only possible but plausible. Ignoring this possibility could cause us to subconsciously exclude legitimate avenues of research.
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- 1.
In this passage, Peirce was referring only to the psychological continuity of ideas in experience. However, in Peirce 1892, he specifically endorsed applying these ideas to the external world as well (footnote p. 480).
- 2.
Many people, especially Dawkins himself, do not think of Dawkins’ Blind Watchmaker theory as a theology. At one point, Dawkins even says that theology does not have a subject matter at all. This is an important mistake. It creates the illusion that Dawkins’ position is only denying, rather than asserting, a fact about the world, which in turn gives the false impression that his theology is more parsimonious than its competitors. This assumption ignores the fact that the boundaries of an intellectual discipline are determined not by the answers it gives, but by the questions it asks. That is why Ptolemaic and Copernican astronomy are both forms of astronomy despite the vast differences in the answers they give to their shared questions. For the same reason, the Blind Watchmaker theology and Calvinist theology are both theologies because they ask the same questions and give radically different answers to them.
- 3.
I don’t like the phrase “in the sandpile,” because it conflicts with Hartshorne’s more accurate reference to the “larger whole” which is the true determining factor of consciousness.
- 4.
Even though he makes no specific comments about metaphysics or cosmogeny, I believe that Judea Pearl’s new mathematical formulation for causal laws strongly supports this framing of the question. Pearl says that mechanical causality, in which the cause follows the effect, occurs only when one system interacts with another. Although his theory can in principle accommodate situations in which two mechanical systems interact, most of his examples involve purposive agents whose actions give rise to a mechanical set of causal laws. This is one reason he refers to his causal mathematics as an “Algebra of Doing.”
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Rockwell, T. (2013). Mind or Mechanism: Which Came First?. In: Swan, L. (eds) Origins of Mind. Biosemiotics, vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5419-5_12
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