Re:What's a Brain? On bacterial, cellular, and other minimal...
by Ukv on Wednesday October 02, 2024 @05:09AM
(#41718629)
> It is very difficult to come up with a materialist argument for what about that 'certain arrangement' makes cognition
I'd claim it's not necessarily harder than it is to argue certain arrangements make a computer. Which is to say, there's grey area but it's ultimately just a label we give to certain patterns/behavior, not some special line where the universe starts doing something different, so it's fine to be somewhat vague/arbitrary (when do sand grains become a heap?).
I think "Cognition as a property of all matter" is leaning too much towards panpsychism. There's a spectrum of chairs from thrones to stumps, but I wouldn't say "Chairness is a property of all matter".
I'd claim it's not necessarily harder than it is to argue certain arrangements make a computer. Which is to say, there's grey area but it's ultimately just a label we give to certain patterns/behavior, not some special line where the universe starts doing something different, so it's fine to be somewhat vague/arbitrary (when do sand grains become a heap?).
I think "Cognition as a property of all matter" is leaning too much towards panpsychism. There's a spectrum of chairs from thrones to stumps, but I wouldn't say "Chairness is a property of all matter".