I see this term a lot, people saying “that’s just vulgar materialism!” I haven’t seen an explanation of what it is yet.
Think clockwork. We used to believe that animals couldn’t feel pain. They weren’t complex subjects situated in a complex environment, but simple biological machines that would yelp in response to a stimuli. It was reductive and lost sight of the bigger picture. Animal cognition is the actual materialist understanding which then unlocks all of the other interdisciplinary scientific observations, its materialistic truth confirmed through those. We do vulgar materialism when we do something like MAGA Communism’s class reductionism. Throw out all of the superstructural issues that people experience the economy through in favour of a purely economic critique that abstracts them into one generic class. Sure you’re left with an observable number and you’ve stripped away everything that isn’t quantifiable, but your materialist critique is limited and acting on it would lead to something like the chauvinism that limited American communists in the 1930s.
Me launching in to a diatribe about how trees are sentient but their sentience is so radically alien to ours, and happens on such a slow time scale, that we are unable to recognize it and unwilling to entertain the idea that radically alien intelligence exists all arounf us.
Are you an actual pan psychic in the wild? I’ve always wanted to talk to someone who holds that view.
What? No. Plants show problem solving ability and awareness of their surroundings in ways that go far beyond their traditional conception of being inert and and unaware of their environment. Panpsychism is woo woo nonsense. I’m talking about observable light, water, and nutrient seeking behaviors, apparently altruistic chemical signalling of danger, protection of offspring, some kind of communication with neighbors to mediate conflict over resources. You have to zoom way, way out to make it look anything like animal communication but these creatures are aware of their environment and interacting with organisms around them.
You don’t need pan-psychism to recognize plants are living organisms. Like, you can anesthetize a tree. In fact, anesthetics work on… pretty much every living organism? I’m not aware of any exceptions.
