Looking forward to this conversation. I thank you for setting up this Café as you did @Geoffreyjen_Edwards and @MarcoMasi (and thank you again for providing your own work free of change, Marco Masi; your effort in bringing difficult subjects into a clear light answers every layperson’s “prayers”). I expect a few future strands of conversations and other deep dives to arise on our forum out of the deep waters we explore this Tuesday.
Wendt’s book has this particular reader working overtime…
…but well worth it. Definitely the most rewarding book I have encountered in a long while. I am trying to work my way to at least the chapters @johnnydavis54 recommended a few months back on quantum semantics, language and meaning. I understand our Café has Wendt’s work listed as supplemental, but I just can’t put this one down. Though the pieces have not all come together yet for me, it should fall into place by the end of the book.
I hesitate to quote from the book based on my low-level comprehension and its (possible) irrelevance to this particular thread. I only bring it up to make a few connections with recent conversation around Timothy Morton and to make introductory and explicit headway into what is a generally implicit discussion that has yet to be voiced in our forum, around some of the names listed in the quote below (can’t read and discuss them all!):
This ontology (vitalism) has both affinities with and differences from an important new movement in critical social theory, associated with Jane Bennett, Gilles Deleuze, Graham Harman, Bruno Latour and others, known variously as New Materialism and/or Neo-Vitalism. A common starting point for this otherwise heterogeneous body of scholarship is a re-thinking of the nature of matter, from the inert and passive substance of classical physics to a productive and active force in nature. A provocative effect of this move is to reveal the essential continuity, not of living matter with dead (as in Old Materialism), but of dead matter with living, such that, in varying degrees, we can attribute to inanimate objects (sic) many of the intentional qualities we normally associate just with human beings…
My proposal for a quantum vitalism has important elements in common with New Materialism. It too aims to re-think matter into a less “material” and more active force. In its panpsychist basis it also sees an essential continuity between living and dead matter. And in its claim that all organisms are subjects it shares a non-anthropocentric, post-humanist view of reality, which would deny to human beings a privileged ontological position from which to justify abusing nature. —Quantum Mind and Social Science: Unifying Physical and Social Ontology, p.146
He goes on to note a few differences in his approach, showing that the New Materialists neglect both a study into consciousness and into quantum theory. He does state that Karen Barad is a likeminded soul, an author JOhnny has mentioned before and @Blake_Poland mentions above. Also Timothy Morton may fit the bill as a “quantum panpsychist” as Wendt labels himself below. In Hyperobjects Morton references quantum theory throughout, adding to what Wendt says is missing from the New Materialist toolkit (and adding a healthy does of what seems to be Tim Morton’s signature style of serious playfulness…or is it playful seriousness?).
The ultimate problem here is that by failing to come to grips with the hard problem of consciousness, the New Materialists/Neo-Vitalists remain caught up in the limits of the classical worldview - in short, by the Old Materialism. Making a quantum panpsychist turn enables us to abandon materialism once and for all in favor of a broader, vitalist physicalism that can accommodate that which is most distinctive about life, namely its subjective aspect — p. 147
I will be going about my days “as if” I am a quantum panpsychist, just to see what arises in this physical stratum. So far it has been a fun ride!