In old school theory class, you can’t say that a spoon is a spoon is a spoon. You can say there isn’t a spoon: It’s just atoms, or just spoon discourses, or spoon positings. You can’t say There is no spoon in a Neo-like mystical paranormal way. You certainly can’t say that a spoon is alive, or conscious. You can hardly say that a chimp is conscious. You can hardly even say that you are conscious, because you have probably acceded to default scientistic materialism with some kind of overlay — so for instance, you claim that consciousness is a product of a discursive formation that decides which things are conscious. Naturally you have ignored the infinite regress (you need an idea of what consciousness is to determine that some things are conscious), or you are convinced that consciousness is a worthless bourgeois construct anyway. So it’s a marvelous and refreshing surprise that Shaviro spends much of a stunningly meticulous, inspiring later chapter arguing for consciousness all the way down to quarks or strings or whatever is down there. Panpsychism is gripping contemporary philosophy, both analytic and continental: It’s no longer taboo to say that consciousness isn’t just human — you can even say, like Shaviro and Galen Strawson, that consciousness is everywhere. Shaviro demonstrates in crystal prose that most of the good logical arguments are on the side of insisting that consciousness is a deep fact about reality, not some special emergent property of neurons or a bonus prize for being highly evolved. Both of those sound rather un-scientific and teleological when you get down to it.
Rock Your World (Or, Theory Class Needs an Upgrade) - The Los...
(I'm kind of obsessed with this article)
