Embracing Death (and Life) with Panpsychism
What can an electron tell us about the nature of our own mind?
I know what you’re thinking: How could electrons really tell us anything about our brains? I’m sure you could create some whimsical, philosophical analogy tying the two together, and that’s all fine and dandy. But in terms of a legitimate, useful connection? Forget about it.
Fair enough. And you’re right, I am going to make a philosophical argument and it will take the form of an analogy. But hear me out. I promise that it is legitimate, and it changed the way I see life, death, and the nature of my own mind.
In physics, an electron is defined only as that which acts as an electron acts. While that somehow seems both incredibly obvious and a little bit stupid, it highlights an important limitation of physics, science, and any other way we could try to understand the world around us.
This limitation is that we are only able to perceive something by measuring how it interacts with other somethings. In terms of an electron, we can measure its mass (how it interacts with gravity), its charge (how it interacts with other electrons and protons), and its size (how it interacts with space). Notice a trend here?
