A Coherent Illusionism? Adding Cosmopsychism

A Coherent Illusionism? Adding Cosmopsychism

Gabriel Murray

In this post, I want to combine two things that I recently wrote about:

1. I wrote that one of the challenges facing illusionist views of consciousness is the experiencer problem: if phenomenal consciousness is an illusion, who or what is experiencing the illusion?
   
2. I briefly wrote about forms of panpsychism, including bottom-up panpsychism (or micropsychism, which has the combination problem) and top-down panpsychism (or cosmopsychism, which has the decombination problem).
   

Is it possible to somehow combine illusionism and cosmopsychism, such that each of the two views can help make the other more coherent?

[Laird]

Some interesting thoughts on an interesting possibility from Gabriel. I like this sort of synthetic thinking: the thinker as a matchmaker, marrying ideas.

That said, I think he is being a little cheeky in his incorporation of illusionism as the bride, in that, per her original nature, there is no self whatsoever - not even a universal self with which our individual psyches identify - or in which they hide, if I may be a little poetic.

The presentation by Luke Roelofs which Gabriel references is particularly interesting. I think that I follow his (Luke's) reasoning, although - expressed as it is in terse slides - I am not 100% confident of that. In one of my responses to your (Sci's) thread which shared the paper "Panpsychism and Mental Monism: Comparison and Evaluation", I noted a problem which in Luke's terms is most probably that which he refers to as either "The Incompatible Contexts Problem", or, alternatively, his "Subject-Summing Problem" (that I am not sure which applies best is probably an artifact of the necessary terseness of Luke's slides): I noted that summing up a variety of micro-perspectives could not plausibly lead one to a macro-perspective of "hunger" since the stomach from which that perception of hunger arises is not visible to the micro-perspectives; it is visible only from a macro perspective.

But now: to the heart of the matter. Is this idea that Luke and Gabriel are advancing here - that of, in Luke's terms, "identifying existence cosmopsychism (IEC)" - coherent? I actually think that it can be. I think that in a sense, it is that for which Bernardo Kastrup is advocating, but I also think that Bernardo gets it wrong, and I hope to share in a new thread my argument to that effect soon (Sci, you will know that argument already, seeing as I have already shared it with you privately - I am simply trying to get some feedback on it / editing help with it before publicising it widely).

Basically, where I think Bernardo goes wrong is in contending that experiences (of mind at large) can themselves experience. Take away that contention, and IEC seems coherent to me - in my terms, it would be the idea that everything that exists is mental energy consisting in minds, the subject of which (i.e., of each mind) is identical. That said, whilst I hold that this view is coherent, I do not think that it is the most plausible model of conscious reality... but as for why, you'll have to wait until after I've had my explanation properly vetted - unless you find it before I've done that (it's already public even though I still want it properly vetted).