I'm probably a panpsychist of some sort, though with significant leanings towards Vedanta. I do consider the mind and intellect to be "material" products, possibly best described by a computational theory of mind, but it seems that awareness itself has got to be ontologically fundamental.

Hylomorphic dualism interests me as well, but I don't understand why there would be something uniquely immaterial about the human intellect. I don't see cognition as the central issue in play here.

"One could be a hylomorphic dualist without being an immaterialist (though it may be that someone adopting such a position would shy away from the term 'dualist', which comes to seem more applicable when one holds the soul to be capable of subsistence). "

Perhaps, but that seems to me really hard. Because hylemorphism itself provides an independent argument for the radical immateriality of the human soul, independently of arguments from universal concepts (though quite similar to those), from self-reflection, orderly mental causation etc. Because given hylemorphism, when we come to know a certain thing, we are in possesion of its form. Our intellect has the form of the known. But if our intellect were material, it would have to literally transform into what the form is, since that is what happens when matter is informed by a form. So whenever we thought of a cat, our intellect would literally become a cat, which is absurd. We also grasp forms qua forms, in their universality, whereas instantiated forms individuated by matter are always particular; so our intellect is not material.

So it is really hard to be a "materialist" hylemorphist, so to speak. And it would also take away quite a few of the explanatory benefits of hylemorphism, such as the capacity to explain intentionality in a neat and non-mysterious way in terms of formal and final causality (having the thing's form, not the thing qua substance, but its form in thought, etc)

Miguel wrote:

Perhaps, but that seems to me really hard. Because hylemorphism itself provides an independent argument for the radical immateriality of the human soul, independently of arguments from universal concepts (though quite similar to those), from self-reflection, orderly mental causation etc. Because given hylemorphism, when we come to know a certain thing, we are in possesion of its form. Our intellect has the form of the known.

It first of all depends on what one counts as "hylomorphism". Minimally, it's just the view that the soul is the form of the body. If one includes more details about cognition, then more resources are available to the immaterialist to make his argument.

Miguel wrote:

But if our intellect were material, it would have to literally transform into what the form is, since that is what happens when matter is informed by a form. So whenever we thought of a cat, our intellect would literally become a cat, which is absurd.

​I am not sure that I am persuaded by this argument. Is immaterialism the only​ way to accommodate the fact that the form of a cat is somehow present when I think of a cat and I am not a cat? Is it even the presumptive way to accommodate that fact?

In particular, it seems that the point may be benignly (for the non-immaterialist) accommodated just by distinguishing modes of presence of a form in a thing. The primary way in which a form is present in a thing is the familiar way of its being the form of the thing, its determining what the thing is. That is how a cat's form is present in a cat. Call this the primary mode.

​Your claim that the human would have to transform into what it knows if it were material has its antecedent in Aristotle and in Aquinas, whom I quote:
​

[E]verything that is in potentiality to something and is receptive of it is lacking in that to which it is in potentiality and of which it is receptive…. Therefore, intellect lacks all those things that it is naturally suited to cognize. Therefore, since our intellect is naturally suited to have intellective cognition of all sensible and corporeal things, it must lack every corporeal nature. (Comm. De an., III.7, 132-139)​

That is all well and good. But the non-immaterialist may now raise the question: in what sense​ does our intellect lack every corporeal nature?

It must be the sense in which the intellect "lacks all those things that it is naturally suited to cognize." But need that be the primary mode? Let the intellect have intellective cognition of some sensible and corporeal thing, like a cat. It was in potentiality to receive the form of a cat, and now it has. It remains a non-cat. This shows that the form of cat is not, now, present in the primary mode. And thus it doesn't show that the form of cat was, then, lacking in the primary mode. Which is to say that we have not shown that, prior to cognizing a cat, the intellect lacks the form of cat in the primary sense, the sense in which (most obviously) a balsam fir lacks the form of cat. More generally, it may be granted that in some sense the intellect must lack every sensible and corporeal form in order to be naturally suited to the cognition of such forms, but it has not been shown that the intellect lacks every sensible and corporeal form in the primary sense​: that is to say, that it has not been shown that the intellect is not sensible and corporeal.

Hypatia wrote:

Well, there are multiple forms of panpsychism. You can take either a bottom-up or top-down approach to it, where consciousness is an attribute of matter either at the atomistic or holistic level. The combination problem is only an issue for the former version--assuming of course that it's a problem at all and not just a fact about reality.

Indeed, the combination problem is the motivation for naturalistic panpsychism, or at least for Galen Strawson's panpsychism. But I think it's also a problem for naturalistic panpsychism.

​But I am not sure what the holistic version is. It is easy enough to understand, if only to reject, the naturalistic panpsychist's claim, that whatever the fundamental bits of matter are, they are conscious. But if one doesn't think that, then what's the view? Positively, you have said that "awareness itself has got to be ontologically fundamental", but the property dualist could say that too. Pan​psychism has to hold that everything, in some sense, is mental, in some sense. If one is a non-naturalist, and holds that everything doesn't include the fundamental bits of matter but rather humans, rocks, chairs, clouds, deep-sea vents, etc., then it is not really clear what the motivation for panpsychism is. Positing consciousness in those other things doesn't seem to help explain consciousness in humans; better, I think, to take humans and other animals to be conscious, sui generis, but that isn't panpsychism.

Hypatia wrote:

I think there is reason to believe that individual conscious units can combine to create larger conscious wholes, since you could potentially argue that something along those lines is happening with insect hives.

​I don't think you can. I think it's very doubtful that insect hives are conscious (that an insect hive can truly be said to be in pain, or see red, or...), but if they are, then I don't see how it's a product of the consciousness of the individual insects which comprise them either.

Hypatia wrote:

Oh, my concern isn't immaterialism. I'm just not sure why the human soul is considered entirely immaterial but an animal's soul is entirely material.

But on hylomorphism, the human soul is not considered entirely​ immaterial, and an animal's soul is not considered entirely​ material. A human soul is still the form of a rational animal​ and is limited by the material of what it informs in various respects. And many of the respects in which it is appropriate to call a human soul immaterial are also respects in which it is appropriate to call an animal soul immaterial. Both are forms rather than matter. In both cases there is an​ immaterial aspect to sensation (the form of what is sensed needs to be present in the senser, in a sense in which it is not present in the thing sensed).

Hypatia wrote:

I'm also not sure exactly how the concept of a formal cause has explanatory power in explaining consciousness, since it seems as hand-wavy as emergentism. I don't know it very well, though, so I could be missing something.

​Well, as I mentioned in another post, I am a qualia skeptic, so there's a sense in which I don't think consciousness needs to be explained but other philosophers think it does.

​But whether one is a qualia skeptic or not, panpsychism is hardly explaining consciousness in a sense in which hylomorphic dualism is not. They would both be taking it as primitive. Neither sheds any light on the mechanism by which something is conscious, if there is any such thing.
 

Hypatia wrote:

One other approach is that it's the universe as a whole that's in some sense conscious rather than the individual subatomic particles. So every rock, tree, and water molecule within the universe does not necessarily have to be conscious--you can end up with something like a Hegelian world-soul instead. Even some of the naturalistic panpsychists seem to veer a bit in this direction at times (I've seen both Nagel and Chalmers hint at it a bit), so it's apparently on the table even for them as long as they can somehow keep it from collapsing into panentheism.

That's fair, this is another option. As an explanation of human consciousness, I think it faces the same orthogonality problem that naturalistic panpsychism faces. We are not much helped in explaining the forms of consciousness with which we are familiar (that is, our own) by supposing that we are part of a universe which itself is a conscious whole, anymore than by supposing that we are composed of bits which are conscious. The problem is exacerbated if one holds that some but not all beings in the conscious universe are conscious; for then one is admitting that the consciousness of the universe does not suffice for their consciousness, and the question arises What does?​. (It's been a while since I've read Nagel and Chalmers, and I don't recall that the consciousness of the whole universe played a significant role in their views. They both seem to hope that there are non-physical laws of consciousness or pre-consciousness, and that aspiration is decidedly naturalistic. I should be careful about pontificating here, though, since it really has been a while, and I am only thinking of Mind and Cosmos and The Conscious Mind​--they have perhaps written on the topic elsewhere.)

​That--that is, the inaptness of panpsychism of either form for explaining human consciousness--is less of a problem for you if you don't consider it to be an explanation of specifically human consciousness. On the other hand, there's still the obscurity as to what explanatory work panpsychism, whether universal or naturalistic, does if some things are conscious (say, humans and bee hives) but not others.

Hypatia wrote:

I'm not sure how the property dualist could hold awareness to be ontologically fundamental, though, at least in the sense I mean it. If it's fundamental to the nature of physical substances that they have mental properties, that seems to result in panpsychism also. Though honestly, I don't know how property dualism avoids collapsing into either substance dualism or panpsychism in general.

​The property dualist holds that there are physical and mental properties, neither of which is reducible to the other. The mental properties could be conceived to be sui generis. That is what I mean by saying that they are ontologically fundamental. The view doesn't hold that it is fundamental to the nature of physical substances that they have mental properties; some do, and some don't. (The view is not substance dualist because it does not hold that there is a distinct substance which has the mental properties.)

Hypatia wrote:

My particular view? I have fairly strong leanings towards a nondualist understanding of awareness as convertible with Being Itself, which puts me immediately into theological waters. My major problem, however, is that I'm not entirely convinced that there's anything about living creatures that makes us uniquely capable of consciousness. It may well be the case that any sort of chemical complexity or information processing system can give rise to consciousness of some form or another, so I'm leery of approaches that preclude even the possibility of things like conscious stars or artificial intelligence. It may be that these things are in fact impossible, but that's not an assumption I'm comfortable making.

Hypatia wrote:

Well, it's impossible to say whether or not a beehive is conscious, but it does seem to be intelligent in a way that the individual bees are not. So there's at the very least evidence for intelligence existing in different degrees at both the unitary and compound levels.

I think it's possible to say that a beehive or a star is not conscious (that it does not feel pain etc.), for the usual Wittgensteinian reasons. That couldn't be true of beehives unless it were true of humans, but I don't think it's true that we cannot say whether or not some human is in pain. (I am taking "cannot say" here to mean "can only provisionally suppose or conjecture".) For our notion of pain is inherently tied to observable criteria. How this is so is a complicated matter, though it's necessary if we are ever to learn how to attribute pain to ourselves or others. It's brought out in the fact that if you try to imagine that ordinary people walking around are in a great deal of pain, then you must imagine that they are artfully concealing it or stoicly bearing it; and in the fact that if you try to imagine a stone in pain, you have to imagine its being different in other ways too (being able to cry, or talk, or move).

Hypatia wrote:

I thought that the human intellect was considered uniquely immaterial? Setting aside the fact that the word "material" is pretty much meaningless so it's hard to say what does and doesn't count, that's the part that I have trouble reconciling with things like cognitive science. But it could be that I haven't mastered the language used in A-T.

​The word "material" is​ very ambiguous, and that's what I was getting at. I was denying that the human soul is "entirely" immaterial and that the animal soul is "entirely" material, because there are several senses of "material" (and correspondingly, "immaterial"), and in various respects human and animal souls are alike in respect of their materiality.

​It's true that the human intellect is considered "uniquely" immaterial, in that it is considered to be immaterial in some (interesting) senses in which animal souls are not. At least two ways are worth highlighting.

​First, the intellect is analogous to the senses, but is in some way less material than them. Aristotle thinks that each sense has a corresponding proper object, by which things can be sensed. Sight has the proper object of color; things are visible (come under the power of sight) insofar as they are colored. Aristotle thinks that it is necessary that the organs of each sense (their seats in the body) lack​ the corresponding proper object, or else nothing could be sensed as it is. The pupil cannot have a color; if it did, then everything would appear that color.

That is one way of attributing a kind of immateriality to animals, as compared with plants. Plants do not have sensation. When they are affected, they simply change "materially" as it were. Animals and humans, it is proposed, have these sense organs which lack the forms of any corresponding proper object of the sense, which enables those forms to be received.

​Aristotle and Aquinas think that intellect is like the senses in that respect: it has a proper object, which it must lack if it is to think of things. But the sense organs only need to lack the forms of their corresponding proper objects. The intellect needs to lack all "corporeal and bodily forms", because it can think of all that is corporeal and bodily (cf. DA II.12, III.4). That is the argument to which Miguel was alluding above. I was there casting doubt as to whether it establishes that the intellect has no bodily organ and that it is subsistent, but whatever one thinks about that argument, this sort of view does provide a​ sense in which the human soul is "more immaterial" than the animal soul.

That brings us to the second relevant sense in which the human soul is said to be uniquely immaterial: it is said to have a power (the intellect) which lacks a bodily organ, and it is said to subsist (to remain in existence even if the substance of which it is [or was] a metaphysical part loses its material cause).

It'd be fair for Miguel to latch onto what I've said here and propose that it provides a way out of the objection I raised. For that argument says that the intellect needs to lack the form of corporeal things in order to be able to think about all of them; I was saying that even when it does think of them, the presence of their forms does not literally make​ the human into what it thinks about; so it cannot be in that sense, before it thinks, that the intellect lacks all corporeal form (that is, that it is not seated in a bodily organ). But Aristotle's treatment of the senses perhaps is supposed to show that the modes of presence and absence do not have to be correlated in the way I am supposing they do. When the eye sees something red, its redness is in some sense present. But is it present in a way that makes​ the eye red? If this could be answered "no", and if it could still be maintained that its receiving the form in whatever way it does​ receive it requires that, before seeing, it was not red, then it could be maintained that the intellect before it thinks, by analogy, needs to lack corporeal form in what I called the primary mode, even if, when it thinks, the corresponding form is not present in the primary mode. There are, perhaps, prospects for rehabilitating the argument.