Philosopher of science Peter Vickers puts forward his take on the recent IAI News standoff between panpsychism and idealism.
It is absolutely accepted that the philosopher should have a great respect for science, as an epistemological endeavour. On the face of it, both science and philosophy search for truth: scientists ask ‘big’ questions such as “Where did human beings ultimately come from?”, and philosophers similarly ask ‘big’ questions such as “What is the relationship between the mind and the brain?”. But whereas scientists sometimes actually reach truth (human beings evolved from more primitive mammals, which themselves evolved from amphibians, etc.), philosophers seemingly never do, and are doomed to forever go round in circles.
Looking back at the history of philosophy, it is usual to speak of ‘fashions’; for example, when we ask about the relationship between mind and matter, there was a time when dualism was in fashion, a time when idealism was in fashion, and another time when physicalism was in fashion. More recently, panpsychism is enjoying a great deal of attention. But it would be bold indeed to claim that philosophers are on the way to definitively solving the mind-matter problem, in the way scientists have definitively solved a huge number of epistemological problems. Of course, some Kuhnians would try to push back, saying that science is punctuated by revolutions. But this is a fallacy: only radicals on the fringe think the evolutionary theory of mankind’s origins will one day be overturned in a Kuhnian revolution. Similarly, scientists really do know where stars come from, how viruses and bacteria cause illness, and a hundred other things. (Open questions concerning the details remain, naturally.)
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