Tracing the “chemical roots of consciousness,” he ends up affirming panpsychism, but insisting that nature is a “technologist.” Someone must do the thinking.
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There is no way to build a computer that does not rely on 1’s and 0’s (computation), so computers that understand meaning are not possible.
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Although it doesn’t emerge in this interview, Strawson is a panpsychist; thus he can maintain a materialist position and still argue that consciousness is real.
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This article is an excerpt of one that originally appeared in Salvo 61 (Summer 2022), under the title “Everything is Conscious? Panpsychism goes mainstream.” Panpsychism — the view that all of the universe participates in consciousness, which is most fully developed in humans — has been gaining popularity in science in recent years. Does that sound unbelievable? Is not science committed wholly to materialism and nothing but materialism? Will consciousness not soon be “explained” by an accidental glitch in brain wiring that natural selection retained? Science doesn’t seem nearly as committed to that view just now. A 2018 article at Quartz by Olivia Goldhill was titled “The idea that everything from spoons to stones is conscious is gaining academic credibility.” Read More ›
To Strawson, it makes more sense to say that consciousness is physical — and that electrons are conscious — than that consciousness is an illusion.
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