DE Weekly: Jack Symes, Panpsychism, & Consciousness
Below is an archived email originally sent on September 23, 2024.
Jack Symes, Panpsychism, & Consciousness
I’m constantly exposing myself to philosophical ideas that might inspire me to delve into more reading and learning. This week, I listened to two different podcasts featuring Jack Symes that did just that for me.
If you don’t know him, Jack Symes is a British philosopher and writer. He’s written several books, and also hosts The Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast.
I’ll admit that, despite having heard of his ideas before, I’ve never listened to the Panpsycast. I’ll definitely go searching for some interesting episodes now, after hearing him on other shows.
If you’d like to know what I found so interesting about his thoughts, read on. Or, go listen to the episodes yourself:
Heaven, Hell, & the Human Condition | Jack Symes | Ep 478 (The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast)
Symes covered a whole slew of topics with Rogan and Peterson, but I found his ideas about human consciousness the most intriguing.
His show is named after the concept of “panpsychism”, the idea that the qualities found in the human mind are more ubiquitous across the universe than we might think.
The mind–consciousness–is not unique to humans, but is instead a fundamental feature of the universe and can be found everywhere.
Symes cited an interesting quote from Elon Musk on consciousness that I also hadn’t heard before, something like “Consciousness is either everywhere, or it is nowhere.” The takeaway hypothesis being that, because we as humans experience it, it must be everywhere.
This idea struck a chord with me.
It actually hearkens back to a newsletter I wrote a few weeks ago discussing Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.
It got me thinking about the way he describes consciousness in that book. Consciousness, to Sartre, exists as “in-itself”.
This means it exists independently of anything else. However, the problem with consciousness is that humans seem to only experience it in relation to other things, which means that it actually is defined in relation to something else.
This would make it exist “for-itself”. Another experience of consciousness we can have comes from its “negative power”, through which we can experience “nothingness” (e.g., the time before we were born. Do you remember that?)
I know that was a bit of an aside, so let me reel the idea back in.
If consciousness really were ubiquitous in the universe outside of the human mind–as panpsychism posits–that would explain some of the experiences we have as humans.
Déjà vu. Pas encore vu, which I wrote about a few weeks ago. It could even help to explain transcendental religious experiences, where people feel a deep connection with God or with the universe that they can’t explain.
It could also mean other living things experience some form of consciousness, even if it’s different from the one we experience.
Symes uses the example of a dog to illustrate this particular point.
He argues that a dog must have some concept of its possibility to exist in the future–it waits for its dinner, anticipates its owner’s return from work, looks forward to its daily walk…
It sounds like dogs must have some understanding of the probability of their future existence given these things.
As you can see from my nerding out, ideas like this really get me going. Jack Symes perfectly explained some of these topics, and it only makes me want to learn more about them.
Ideas like this can help tie different ideas together, and create a unifying thread for everything you think you know as they exist in relation to each other.
So go listen to Jack Symes, go read about panpsychism, consciousness, and more. You might find yourself in a wonderful rabbit hole.
Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Brandon J. Seltenrich
P.S.––
I wrote last week how, if you look for it, you can find existentialist ideas in lots of literature. I’m reading Confucius’s The Analects for the first time, and it’s the perfect example of that. I can’t believe I haven’t read it in its entirety before, and I highly recommend it.
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