Recently I learned that H.P. Lovecraft had undergone a surprising and dramatic political transformation in the final years of his brief life. I wanted to read a few of Lovecraft's letters and discuss his views on capitalism, socialism, and the influence of the profit motive on artistic expression. In these letters from the last several years of his life, his notorious racism seems to fade, and he explicitly rejects the reactionary political ideology he held prior to 1931. He ruthlessly critiques capitalism, speaks glowingly of Marx, and warns us that our only options are socialism or barbarism. First episode on Lovecraft @waldenpod Lovecraft Letters: 1937, Catherine Moore 1936 Arthur Sechrist 1934, Helen Barlow Lovecraft Audiobooks: Dagon The Call of Cthulhu At the Mountains of Madness The Shadow Over Innsmouth / timestamps / 00:00 Introduction 02:53 Flawed Characters, Real and Fictional 09:30 Letter to Catherine Moore (1937) 13:00 Letter to Helen Barlow (1934) 15:32 Letter to Arthur Sechrist (1936) 17:23 Art & the Profit Motive 19:52 The Shadow Transcript

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42 - H.P. Lovecraft’s Radical Political Evolution

I was recently interviewed by Zac of Adherent Apologetics on the subject of problems with physicalism. We outline a few arguments against the view, including physicalism’s conflict with realism about phenomenal consciousness and anti-emergentism, as well as a couple different forms of the vagueness argument against physicalism. We also talk a bit about the tradition of atheist non-physicalism, which is almost entirely behind the recent rise in interest in alternatives to physicalism. Other topics include the science of consciousness, the relationship between neuroscience and the metaphysics of consciousness, the standard thinking that motivates physicalism and where it goes wrong, panpsychism, and other subjects related to philosophy of mind. Subscribe to Zac’s channel and my channel linktr.ee/emersongreen Support on Patreon here emersongreenblog.wordpress.com Rate the show on iTunes here Listen to our sister show Counter Apologetics here Subscribe to CA and Walden Pod on YouTube here Follow on Twitter @waldenpod and @OnPanpsychism Music by ichika Nito. Used with permission.

What’s wrong with physicalism? — with Zac of Adherent Apologetics

Today I'm speaking with Dr. Michael Huemer about phenomenal conservatism, a theory in epistemology that seeks to ground justified beliefs in the way things “appear” or “seem” to the subject who holds that belief. We discuss a wide range of issues in epistemology, including internalism vs. externalism, justified true belief, proper functionalism, the epistemic value of psychedelic experiences, religious experiences, radical skepticism, knowledge, conceptual analysis, intuition, and much else. Michael Huemer is a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado. He is the author of more than seventy academic articles in epistemology, ethics, metaethics, metaphysics, and political philosophy, as well as several books, including Skepticism and the Veil of Perception, Ethical Intuitionism, Paradox Lost, and Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism, and his new book, Knowledge, Reality, and Value: A Mostly Common Sense Guide to Philosophy. PC: If it seems to S that P, then, in the absence of defeaters, S thereby has at least some justification for believing that P. Michael’s Website Phenomenal Conservatism - IEP Compassionate Phenomenal Conservatism MH YouTube Channel  / / /  linktr.ee/emersongreen For the extended version of this interview, support on Patreon here emersongreenblog.wordpress.com Rate the show on iTunes here Listen to our sister show Counter Apologetics here Subscribe to CA and Walden Pod on YouTube here Follow on Twitter @waldenpod and @OnPanpsychism / / / YouTube version of this episode 

41 - Phenomenal Conservatism & Epistemology w/ Michael Huemer

Naturalists, according to David Papinau, author of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on naturalism, urge “that reality is exhausted by nature, containing nothing ‘supernatural’.” Naturalism “has no very precise meaning in contemporary philosophy” beyond this, along with an emphasis on science as a means to understand the natural world. Naturalism is the view that there is only the natural world. I defend this simple conception of naturalism, ward off a few criticisms, and argue that there’s a kind of parity between the terms “theism” and “naturalism.” In other words, if you don’t have a problem with the term “theism,” you shouldn’t have a problem with “naturalism.” Luke Roelofs - Combining Minds: How to Think about Composite Subjectivity Is God the Best Explanation of Things? A Dialogue - Joshua Rasmussen & Felipe Leon (this wasn’t mentioned in the episode, but Leon does a wonderful job fleshing out “liberal naturalism” Graham Oppy - The Best Argument Against God Sean Carroll - Poetic Naturalism Galen Strawson - Real Naturalism William Lycan - Philosophy of Language: A Contemporary Introduction Naturalism - SEP / / /  linktr.ee/emersongreen YouTube Transcript  Rate the show on iTunes Support on Patreon here Listen to our sister show Counter Apologetics here Follow on Twitter @waldenpod and @OnPanpsychism / / /  a few elaborations of naturalism... “By ‘naturalism’ I mean the view that the world contains a single basic type of stuff, whose behavior is governed by a single set of simple, general laws, and that these laws are those revealed by science. The most common version of naturalism among contemporary philosophers is physicalism, the view that the world is entirely made up of matter, and matter is exhaustively described by physics. But some philosophers reject physicalism, even while accepting naturalism, holding that matter is not exhaustively described by physics—there are fundamental aspects of matter that physics is blind to. In particular (they tend to say), there are certain things each of us can know about matter, such as that one particular portion of matter (the one between our ears) sometimes feels and thinks and experiences, which go beyond both what physics itself says and what can be deduced from any physical description, no matter how detailed. Because facts about my consciousness are left out by any purely physical descriptions, these ‘naturalistic anti-physicalists’ infer that consciousness must be itself a fundamental feature of reality, no more derivable from physical properties than mass is derivable from charge.” Luke Roelofs “Naturalism is a philosophy according to which there is only one world -- the natural world, which exhibits unbroken patterns (the laws of nature), and which we can learn about through hypothesis testing and observation. In particular, there is no supernatural world -- no gods, no spirits, no transcendent meanings. I like to talk about a particular approach to naturalism, which can be thought of as Poetic. By that I mean to emphasize that, while there is only one world, there are many ways of talking about the world. "Ways of talking" shouldn't be underestimated; they can otherwise be labeled "theories" or "models" or "vocabularies" or "stories," and if a particular way of talking turns out to be sufficiently accurate and useful, the elements in its corresponding vocabulary deserve to be called real.” Sean Carroll “Naturalism says that causal reality is natural reality: the domain of causes is nothing more nor less than the natural world. Atheism says that there are no gods; in consequence, atheism says that there is no God. Naturalism entails atheism: if causal reality is natural reality, then there is no (supernatural) cause of natural reality, and, in particular, there is no God. But atheism does not entail naturalism: to deny that there are gods is not to insist that causal reality is natural reality. . . . Supernaturalism says that causal reality outstrips natural reality: there are supernatural causes. . . . This ‘minimal’ conception of naturalism relies on a prior understanding of the distinction between the natural and the supernatural (as did our ‘minimal’ conception of theism). We shall proceed on the assumption that we do understand this distinction well enough. If we come to have doubts about whether we do understand this distinction well enough, then we can return to give it more careful consideration. ‘Minimal naturalism’ admits of elaboration in many different – mutually inconsistent – ways. Any suitably elaborated naturalism will hold that some features of the natural world are primitive – not susceptible of further explanation – whereas other features of the natural world are fully explained in terms of those primitive features. Thus, for example, some naturalists suppose that all of the primitive features of the natural world are physical features – i.e. features that lie in the proper domain of the discipline of physics. Other naturalists suppose that there are features of the natural world . . . that cannot be fully explained in terms of the fundamental physical properties. The key point to note is that all naturalists suppose that there are no supernatural causal properties…” Graham Oppy

40 - What is Naturalism?

Aaron is a lecturer in the Rutgers philosophy department (@ETVpod). Emerson is the host of Counter Apologetics and Walden Pod (@waldenpod). Aaron’s podcast, Embrace the Void https://voidpod.com/ This debate took place on the Right to Reason podcast https://therighttoreason.podbean.com/e/panpsychism-debate/ https://linktr.ee/emersongreen

Panpsychism Debate: Emerson Green vs. Aaron Rabinowitz

Dr. Dustin Crummett received a PhD from the University of Notre Dame in 2018, and he is currently working on animal ethics as a postdoctoral researcher at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He specializes in social and political philosophy, ethics, and philosophy of religion. Today, we talk about vagueness arguments against materialism, phenomenal conservatism, doubt arguments, Phineas Gage, physical causal closure, the core theory, vitalism, ghosts, split-brain cases, occam's razor, panpsychism, idealism, dual-aspect theories, and the problem of psychophysical luck. Dustin’s website http://dustincrummett.com/ Micah Edvenson & Dustin Crummett on Socialism Dustin Crummett with John Buck & Inspiring Christianity on Dualism  A Deeper Analysis of the Problem of Evil with Dr. Dustin Crummett  Is The Problem Of Evil Worse Than We Thought? Non-Alchemist & Dr. Dustin Crummett  Science, Mind, and the Limits of Understanding - Noam Chomsky  Can physicalism explain phenomenal consciousness?  Luke Roelofs - Combining Minds  Hedda Hassel Morch - The Evolutionary Argument for Phenomenal Powers  / / / emersongreenblog.wordpress.comSupport on Patreon at patreon.com/waldenpod or /counter Rate the show on iTunes Subscribe to CA and Walden Pod on YouTube  Follow on Twitter @waldenpod and @OnPanpsychism linktr.ee/emersongreen

39 - How do you defend substance dualism? with Dustin Crummett

What is philosophy, and who counts as a philosopher? My two favorite answers come from Alvin Plantinga and Arthur Schopenhauer. According to Plantinga, philosophy is just thinking hard about something. Schopenhauer put it a bit more loftily: philosophy represents our attempt to “lay bare the true nature of the world.” (At least, this is true in philosophy’s more ambitious moments.) Additionally, I would submit that philosophy is the intensification of a natural human activity. linktr.ee/emersongreen David Egan on Philosophy [Aeon] Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig on Philosophy [Reasonable Faith] Transcript [emersongreenblog] Is philosophy dead? [iTunes] You’re wrong to hate philosophy [iTunes] 

38 - What is Philosophy?

 linktr.ee/emersongreenYou can watch the video version of this podcast here emersongreenblog.wordpress.com Rate the show on iTunes here Support on Patreon here Listen to our sister show Counter Apologetics here Subscribe to CA and Walden Pod on YouTube here Follow on Twitter @waldenpod and @OnPanpsychism

37 - Watching a painfully bad critique of panpsychism

We discuss poetic naturalism and its nemesis, tunnel vision reductionism. Tunnel vision reductionism takes one description of reality and declares it to be the “real” description of reality to the exclusion of all others. At the very least, the given lower level of description is considered “more true” than higher-level descriptions.The basic problem with tunnel vision reductionism is that it has a narrow and inconsistent notion of the real. Neurons are taken to be real, but emotions are illusory (or at least, less real than neurons). Both are emergent, higher level phenomena, but for some reason, the former is the true description. But if love isn’t real because it’s a higher level description, then neurons aren’t real either. Neither are chemicals like oxytocin. But of course, higher level descriptions are real. There are many legitimate theories, models, vocabularies, stories, and ways of talking about the world. As poetic naturalist Sean Carroll puts it, “if a particular way of talking turns out to be sufficiently accurate and useful, the elements in its corresponding vocabulary deserve to be called real.” If we describe the biochemical correlates of love, we haven’t described everything there is to know about love, nor have we given the “real” description of love.“But all this only works if we reject reductive materialism, right?” No! This is true especially if one accepts reductive materialism. On reductive materialism, the feeling of love and oxytocin are both real in exactly the same way. LinktreeYouTube Transcript Twitter @waldenpod

36 - Tunnel Vision Reductionism: Is love just a chemical reaction?

Here’s my conversation with John Buck and Craig Reid that was held on Craig’s YouTube channel. I was invited on to discuss atheism and consciousness, two of my favorite subjects. Unfortunately we were having audio issues at different points, but I did a bit of editing to make it more listenable. Craig’s channel is primarily devoted to Christian apologetics, but here we mostly discuss consciousness. We talk about my religious background near the beginning, and my reasons for being an atheist a bit near the end, but most of the conversation is on physicalism, panpsychism, dualism, and a lot of interesting questions related to those ideas. Craig's YouTube Channel  Follow John Buck on Twitter here and Craig Reed here  https://linktr.ee/emersongreen  

Interview with John Buck and Craig Reed

When it comes to the combination problem, there are almost always controversial hidden assumptions about the stuff doing the combining and about the entity being formed by the combining. The assumptions one makes about the self and physical reality alter the difficulty and nature of the combination problem.As Luke Roelofs has argued in his extensive book, Combining Minds, the combination problem is a much wider problem that doesn’t dissipate if one rejects panpsychism in favor of physicalism. He also convincingly shows that panpsychists are not required to appeal to strong emergence to explain the existence of the self or subject. While the combination problem does not deter me from taking panpsychism seriously, it’s nonetheless an interesting research program that warrants thoughtful study. The distinction I’m trying to draw here is between a problem that should dissuade one from adopting a view, and a puzzle that should inspire one to keep thinking about the view. Luke Roelofs on Consciousness Live! with Richard Brown [YouTube] Nino Kadic on the Combination Problem and Phenomenal Routing [YouTube] Galen Strawson on the subject-experience-content identity view [YouTube] The Subject of Experience - Galen Strawson [Oxford University Press] Panpsychism’s combination problem is a problem for everyone - Angela Mendelovici [PDF] Combining Minds: How to Think about Composite Subjectivity - Luke Roelofs [Oxford University Press] / / / Transcripts available at emersongreenblog.wordpress.com Follow on Twitter @waldenpod and @OnPanpsychismpatreon.com/waldenpod https://linktr.ee/emersongreen

35 - A few reasons the combination problem doesn’t bother me much

We discuss the ideas that have led me away from physicalism. Specifically, realism about phenomenal consciousness, phenomenal precision, nonemergence (that there is only weak emergence, no strong emergence), monism, the objective/subjective divide, and the explanatory gap. David Chalmers - Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness (http://consc.net/papers/facing.html) [text] Galen Strawson - Realistic monism: why physicalism entails panpsychism (https://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~seager/strawson_on_panpsychism.doc#:~:text=What%20does%20physicalism%20involve%3F&text=Full%20recognition%20of%20the%20reality,theory%20of%20what%20there%20is.) [doc] Thomas Nagel - Panpsychism (http://www.philosopher.eu/nagel-panpsychism/) [PDF] Nagel - What is it like to be a bat? (https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/study/ugmodules/humananimalstudies/lectures/32/nagel_bat.pdf) [PDF] Nagel - Subjective and Objective (https://philpapers.org/rec/NAGSAO) [philpapers] Philip Goff - Orthodox Property Dualism+The Linguistic Theory of Vagueness=Panpsychism (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-007-6001-1_7) [Springer] Hunter Ash - The Argument from Vagueness (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4VNvA3zPaw) [YouTube] Galen Strawson & Philosophy Bites - Panpsychism (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pi-TOxtczQQ) [YouTube] William James - Principles of Psychology (https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/Principles/prin6.htm) [text] Panpsychism (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/#OtheArguForPanp) [SEP] . . . Transcripts available at emersongreenblog.wordpress.com (https://emersongreenblog.wordpress.com/) Follow on Twitter @waldenpod and @OnPanpsychism https://linktr.ee/emersongreen

34 - Can physicalism explain phenomenal consciousness?

We discuss the metaphysical views of pessimist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, as elaborated in his magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation. Schopenhauer developed a fascinating dual-aspect monism, according to which from outside, the world appears as representation, but from inside, it appears as will: ontological monism and epistemological dualism. To Schopenhauer, desire-driven will is what we are from inside, and he goes on to argue that we should think of the underlying reality of all appearance in the same way. You represent my will as a body, but I know that there’s an underlying reality to your representation that’s experiential in character. Schopenhauer thinks the basis of this dual-aspect character of reality pervades the natural world, organic and inorganic. Why? Because this is our only form of insight into—or acquaintance with—anything as a thing in itself. “[O]n the path of objective knowledge, thus starting from the representation, we shall never get beyond the representation, i.e., the phenomenon.  We shall therefore remain at the outside of things; we shall never be able to penetrate into their inner nature, and investigate what they are in themselves…So far, I agree with Kant.  But … we ourselves are the thing-in-itself. Consequently, a way from within stands open to us to that real inner nature of things to which we cannot penetrate from without.  It is, so to speak, a subterranean passage, a secret alliance, which, as if by treachery, places us all at once in the fortress that could not be taken by attack from without.” - Schopenhauer Schopenhauer on Will and Representation - Academy of Ideas (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNDw9lO8uKg) [YouTube] Peter Sjöstedt-H - Noumenautics: Metaphysics - Meta-Ethics - Psychedelics (https://www.amazon.com/Noumenautics-Metaphysics-Psychedelics-Peter-Sjostedt-H/dp/0992808855) [Amazon] Schopenhauer and the Philosophy of Mind - Peter Sjöstedt-H (http://www.philosopher.eu/texts/schopenhauer-and-the-philosophy-of-mind/) [Philosopher.eu] Hedda Hassel Mørch - Argument for Panpsychism from Experience of Causation (https://philpapers.org/rec/MRCTAF) [PDF] Nietzsche’s Metaphysics? - Galen Strawson (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoNKiM968cU) [YouTube] Idealism - Schopenhauer (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/idealism/#Scho) [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy] Arthur Schopenhauer (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schopenhauer/) [SEP] Arthur Schopenhauer (https://iep.utm.edu/schopenh/) [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy] Transcripts available at emersongreenblog.wordpress.com (https://emersongreenblog.wordpress.com/) Rate the show on iTunes here (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/walden-pod/id1474408172) Listen to our sister show Counter Apologetics here (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/counter-apologetics/id1273573417?mt=2) Subscribe to CA and Walden Pod on YouTube here (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqBy2TfJbYXjqBL3cQOFUig) Support the show at patreon.com/waldenpod Contact me at emersongreen@protonmail.com or on Facebook (http://facebook.com/counterapologeticspodcast) Follow on Twitter @waldenpod and @OnPanpsychism

33 - Schopenhauer on Mind & Matter

I would like to introduce what may be a new argument, the f-inductive argument from consciousness for panpsychism. (Scroll to the bottom of these shownotes for some helpful detail about the argument.) Panpsychism entails the existence of consciousness, whereas most competing views do not. The evidence—consciousness, in this case—is not surprising on the hypothesis of panpsychism, but is surprising on the hypothesis of physicalism, as well as many of panpsychism’s rivals. The probability that consciousness would exist on panpsychism isn’t just high—it’s 1. The probability that we would find this evidence in a physicalist universe is less than that. In fact, it’s unexpected. So other evidence held equal, panpsychism has a notable edge here. Jeffery Jay Lowder | F-Inductive Arguments: A New Type of Inductive Argument (https://www.patheos.com/blogs/secularoutpost/2014/03/21/f-inductive-arguments-a-new-type-of-inductive-argument/) [Patheos] Jeffery Jay Lowder | An F-Inductive Argument from Consciousness for Theism, Revisited (https://www.patheos.com/blogs/secularoutpost/2020/02/11/an-f-inductive-argument-from-consciousness-for-theism-revisited/) [Patheos] Transcripts available at emersongreenblog.wordpress.com (https://emersongreenblog.wordpress.com/) My Discord (https://discord.com/invite/v7rm8wd) Rate the show on iTunes here (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/walden-pod/id1474408172) Support on Patreon here (https://www.patreon.com/waldenpod) Listen to our sister show Counter Apologetics here (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/counter-apologetics/id1273573417?mt=2) Subscribe to CA and Walden Pod on YouTube here (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqBy2TfJbYXjqBL3cQOFUig) Contact me at emersongreen@protonmail.com or on Facebook (http://facebook.com/counterapologeticspodcast) Follow on Twitter @waldenpod and @OnPanpsychism / / /  Let B=background information or evidence; E=the evidence to be explained; H=an explanatory hypothesis; Pr(|H|)=the intrinsic probability of H; and Pr(x|y)=the epistemic probability of x conditional upon y. C-inductive:  Pr(H | E & B) > P(H | B) F-inductive:  Pr(E | H2 & B) > Pr(E | H1 & B) P-inductive:  Pr(H | E & B) > ½ Here is the F-inductive argument from consciousness for panpsychism: Let E in this case be consciousness. (1) E is known to be true, i.e., Pr(E) is 1. (2) Panpsychism is not intrinsically much less probable than Physicalism, i.e., Pr(|Panpsychism|) is not much less than Pr(|Physicalism|). (3) Pr(E | Panpsychism & B) > Pr(E | Physicalism & B). (4) Therefore, other evidence held equal, Panpsychism is probably true. Pr(Panpsychism | B & E) > 0.5.

32 - A New Argument for Panpsychism: The F-inductive Argument from Consciousness

Here’s a very short overview of my version of panpsychism. Please keep in mind that this contains some technical language and assumes some background knowledge in philosophy of mind.  @waldenpod on Twitter and @OnPanpsychism Transcript Rate the show on iTunes hereSupport the podcast at patreon.com/waldenpod Listen to our sister show Counter Apologetics here Subscribe to CA and Walden Pod on YouTube here Contact me at emersongreen@protonmail.com or on Facebook 

31 - Panpsychism in Seven 1/2 Minutes

Walden Pod is a philosophy, science, and culture podcast featuring Emerson Green (Counter Apologetics).

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