A Place For Consciousness: Probing the Deep Structure of the Natural World

A Place For Consciousness: Probing the Deep Structure of the Natural World

The link is to the introduction to the work provided on Ian Thompson's site. Introduction by the author of the book:

The book is the culmination of a project spanning more than a decade. It presents a synoptic metaphysics for the natural world that places mind within it in a comfortable and beautiful way. You can find a short and simple visual executive summary of the book's central themes and ideas here. The key arguments and advances in the book are,

• A direct argument against the view that consciousness is physical (i.e., an argumet that is not a conceivability or knowledge argument).
  
• A proposal for a view called Liberal Naturalism for understanding the natural world without physicalism.
  
• An argument that we can and should separate a basic concept of experiencing from our specifically mental concept of consciousness.
  
• Several arguments connecting the hard problem of consciousness to the metaphysics of causality.
  
• The introduction of a new paradigm for understanding causality called Causal Significance. The Causal Significance of a thing is the difference its existence makes to the space of possible ways the world can be.
  
• A framework for understanding the deep structure of the natural world as a causal mesh of overlapping natural individuals.
  
• An argument for tying experiencing into the categorical foundations of the causal mesh and a detailed development showing exactly how to do it.
  
• A derivation of solutions to many of the deepest mysteries surrounding the hard problem of consciousness, including Chalmers' "Paradox of Phenomenal Judgment".
  

A remark on Gregg Rosenberg's book by Marcus Arvan, creator of the P2P Simulation Hypothesis:

Gregg Rosenberg on Consciousness and Causation -- Underrated Philosophy?

Anyway, here's why I think the book is underappreciated.  Here's a first pass: it's a book that more or less singlehandedly caused me, a one-time staunch physicalist, to become a mind-body dualist. I know this is just a personal anecdote, but still, I think it is worth dwelling on for a moment. I started out my undergraduate career doing philosophy of mind at Tufts with Dan Dennett, one of the hardest-core physicalists out there. I was completely on board with him. Dualism had always seemed silly to me, and completely at odds with any scientifically respectable account of reality. And reading David Chalmers' book The Conscious Mind didn't sway me at all. The Zombie Argument -- the argument that Chalmers' entire book was based on -- immediately struck me then (just as it does now) as utterly question-begging. It seemed to me that will share Chalmers' intuition that zombies are conceivable, and so metaphysically possible, if one antecedently finds dualism attractive. Since I didn't find dualism attractive in the slightest, the Zombie Argument seemed silly to me.

Anyway, I more or less remained a physicalist...until I read Rosenberg's book. What was it about the book that did it for me? What was it that converted me into dualist? The first preface of Rosenberg's wonderful premise hits the nail on the head...

Some posts on Guide to Reality Blog, by the philosopher Steve Esser, on Gregg Rosenberg's work:

Rosenberg, Consciousness & Causality (Part 1)

Rosenberg, Consciousness & Causality (Part 2)

Q&A with Gregg Rosenberg

Experience and Causation

Causality and the Combination Problem

Gregg Rosenberg

The combination problem is a question about nature which does not present traditional philosophical conceptual issues. The part of nature which must be confronted is causality itself, and a new view of causality provides a very satisfying solution to the combination problem for panpsychism. To embrace this view, panpsychists must embrace two key re-framings of traditional problems, and also re-evaluate which questions about causality and mind are philosophically most interesting.

Mainstream discussion of causality almost always begins and ends with discussions about judgments of cause and effect or the language of cause and effect. The guiding image is that of a probability tree. Time is a tree of different outcomes, the actual world is a path through the tree, and causality is a way of influencing or setting probabilities for each branch of the tree.

A “probability tree” in which causality is a way of setting/changing probabilities is the fundamental frame from which discussions of causality depart. Significant questions within this frame include: is causality epistemic or metaphysical? Can causality work only from the past to the future? How do we understand the relation between “cause” and “effect”? What are dispositions? This fundamental causality frame does not help the panpsychist, whose interest in causality is driven by a desire to understand causal interactions and the way causal interactions partition the world.

The probability tree is a flawed metaphor. The major problem with the probability tree is that the cause-and-effect relationship is a poor starting point for understanding the metaphysical basis of interactions and its relation to the world's structure, as our cause-and-effect concepts contain many assumptions which could be false in a world with in which things interact, and are heavily intertwined with human psychological components.