General American Non-Fiction Narration
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North American (General) North American (US General American - GenAM)Transcript
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the combination problem for Pan Psych ism. David J. Chalmers one introduction Pan Sikhism The view that fundamental physical entities have conscious experiences isn't exciting and promising view for addressing the mind body problem. I have argued in Pant, Sikhism and Pan proto Sikhism that it promises to share the advantages of both materialism and dualism and the disadvantages of neither. In particular, it can respect both the epistemological intuitions that motivate dualism and the causal intuitions that motivate physical ism. Nevertheless, Pan Sikhism is subject to a major challenge. The combination problem. This is roughly the question. How do the experiences of fundamental physical entities such as quirks and photons combine to yield to the familiar sort of human conscious experience that we know and love? The most influential formulation of the combination problem was given by William James in the Principles of Psychology 18 95. In criticizing mind dust theory on which mental states air held to be compounds of elemental mental states, James made the following observations where the elemental units are supposed to be feelings. The case is in no wise altered take 100 of them, shuffle them and pack them as close together as you can, whatever that may mean. Still, each remains the same feeling. It always waas shut in its own skin, windowless, ignorant of what the other feelings are and mean. There would be 100 and first feeling there if when a group or Siris of such feelings were set up. Ah, consciousness belonging to the group as such should emerge, and this 101st feeling would be a totally new fact. The 100 original feelings might buy a curious physical law. Be a signal for its creation when they came together, but they would have no substantial identity with it, nor it with them. And no one could ever deduce the one from the others or, in any intelligible sense, say that they evolved it. Take a sentence of a dozen words and take 12 men and tell to each one word. Then stand the men in a row or jam them in a bunch and let each think of his word as intently as he will. Nowhere will there be a consciousness of the whole sentence. We talk of the spirit of the age and the sentiment of the people, and in various ways we high pasta ties, public opinion. But we know this to be symbolic speech and never dreamed that the spirits opinion sentiment, etcetera constitute a consciousness other than and additional to that of the several individuals whom the words age people or public denote. The private minds do not a glom a rate into a higher compound mind. James is here, arguing that experiences feelings do not aggregate into further experiences and that mines do not aggregate into further minds. If this is right, any version of pan Sikhism that holds that micro experiences experiences of micro physical entities combined to yield macro experiences. Experiences of macroscopic entities such as humans is in trouble. In recent years, there has been a small groundswell of activity on pan Sikhism, and in particular there has been a small groundswell of activity on the combination problem. The problem was given its name by William Seeger, 1995 and was given an especially sharp formulation by Philip Goff. 2009 Proposals for addressing it have been presented by Sam Coleman 12 4013 This volume Golf 2009 b 2011 This volume Greg Rosenberg, 4 4014 Seeger 2010. This Volume and others, It is fair to say that no proposed solution has yet gained much support. However, this article is an attempt at a systematic treatment of the combination problem. I distinguish a number of aspects or versions of the problem. I discussed various ways in which the combination problem can be turned into an argument against pan Sikhism. I then tried to systematically lay out the options for dealing with the combination problem, examining their advantages and disadvantages. A reasonable goal here is to either solve the combination problem or prove that it cannot be solved. I cannot say that I have achieved either of these objectives in this article as it stands, but I hope to at least clarify the issues enough to help others to make progress.