Does eliminative materialism become panpsychism?

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Jordan's absolutely brilliant and I'd have to say I can't get enough of his lectures these days. Another good one that's quite recent is The Resurrection of Logos.

To my lengthy post from a couple days ago I'm going to recompound a certain point.

My understanding of mystical experience as well as experiences people can have on hallucinogens or dissociatives such as DXM and the like:

The first category is visual stimulation, sensory flanging, and particularly the release of hypnogogic imagery to non-hypnogogic states, ie. such as when you're wide awake and seeing mental images of this sort almost supersede your vision. Sometimes you'll see these almost like some type of Windows screensaver fading or weaving through each other like sliding texture collages. At other times you'll see a normal image but the person or things in the picture have certain pronounced features and the image will refresh several times over with those pronounced features becoming more gaudy/eccentric with each pass as if there's a sort of fractal-monster effect at play. All of these experiences clearly smack of neurological feedback loops in the brain doubling back on themselves and smacks quite heavily of what Oliver Sacks describes in this video as Charles Bonnet syndrome:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgOTaXhbqPQ


Then there's the 'other' type that I've described here. The sense that your nervous system is cross-sectional to these super-tight guitar-strings, which are so tight that they're unnoticeable and at certain points they can go slack as if someone let the tensioners down. Normally you might be somewhere and if something lets say 'other' wants to interact with you you'll feel it on your skin and it's almost always an excitement of your neurons. This would make sense because if whatever this is, ie. quantum effect or something that isn't quantum but nonetheless barks, wags its tail, and chases cats as if it were, if it's so tightly correlated with each neuron it would mean that you have no other place of sensation for such things to interact. It's part of why when people talk about these experiences such as being paralyzed and accosted by a ghost or touched in some way there's a sensation like spider-webs associated. Similarly if that coupling between your nerves and, whaver this is, goes slack you can really start to detect major outlines of forms, intentionality, emotion, etc.. and tbh - some of these things when you do pick up intentionality or personality from them it's difficult to describe their personality and intention attributes as anything other than sublime/holy. To me I don't know what these are, and to my best guess there are plenty of people who may do this when they're sleeping and not realizing it (certain key-offs or me is that feeling it when I'm waking up is a common occurrence). The other part is that there may very well be people who've 'learned to swim' so to speak while they're awake, and further still there could be the whole managerie of living things that people like Robert Bruce, William Earnest Butler, or Franz Bardon often like/liked to talk about.


^^ Take the above with as many grains of salt as you wish, entire quarries if you need to. When I try to map out my own experiences I'm at least glad that this does sort out relatively neatly now that I've studied myself and my experiences longer, and I won't lie - there are dynamics that are closer to the center where honesty I can't tell, ie. they could either be very well-built subconscious characters or they could be very dim apprehensions of third-party agencies but they're not far enough to either one side or the other to say anything definitively.

I really do look forward to the day when subjective experience can be demistified because I really don't think that hallucinations, lets say, are infinite in their quality and variety; ie. certain patterns seem like they're persistent with neurological artifacts. My personal sense of what's going to happen - we'll probably find outselves in a position where rather than trying to figure out where everything comes from in the brain we'll be trying to figure out how much of us resides on the brain, how to test whether things like memories are truly synaptic (in their granular details they very well could be), and be able to get a clear sense, if there are both physical and non-physical strata to the self how much goes to what. That and - we'll able to do it without all kinds of obscurantist riddles and requests to take absurd claims on faith as a sign of worthiness or dedication.

Getting back on topic though:

I think the arguments in my OP hit more directly the types of people who claim that consciousness is irrelevant than those who claim strong emergence. Strong emergence at least has a limit, just that I think when people put consciousness too directly back on mechanism they saying things more in line with weak emergence or even lower parts of the chain.

I guess really I, and I think the guy who I posted a video of in my OP, were taking a shot at how poorly Dan Dennett and people like him tend to articulate their ideas. While I do respect the degree of academic work they've done I think they set themselves up rather badly and for a lot of very incisive criticism if they leave certain very important areas wide open and up to the reader or listener to try and sort out for themselves.