[Lerc]

"certain arranges of matter exhibit cognition"

This is the threshold I talk about in my sibling comment. It is very difficult to come up with a materialist argument for what about that 'certain arrangement' makes cognition. I am unsure if it is possible to prove that there is no such argument, but I don't think we have made any progress in finding one either.

[Ukv]

> It is very difficult to come up with a materialist argument for what about that 'certain arrangement' makes cognition

I'd claim it's not necessarily harder than it is to argue certain arrangements make a computer. Which is to say, there's grey area but it's ultimately just a label we give to certain patterns/behavior, not some special line where the universe starts doing something different, so it's fine to be somewhat vague/arbitrary (when do sand grains become a heap?).

I think "Cognition as a property of all matter" is leaning too much towards panpsychism. There's a spectrum of chairs from thrones to stumps, but I wouldn't say "Chairness is a property of all matter".

[brudgers]

“Exhibit cognition” is weak sauce anyway.

Do we doubt people we know think when they are absent? Is our phone exhibiting cognition when we have telephone conversations?

[tshaddox]

Isn’t that just the sorites paradox?

[Lerc]

I don't think so. The distinction is about whether or not there is a point of transition. The sorites paradox is more about identifying where the transition is. You can apply sorites paradox to a colour gradient going from red to , green arguing you can't pinpoint the threshold but you wouldn't deny that the transition point is somewhere within the range.

I never found the sorites paradox to be a terribly challenging argument in itself. Formal proofs rely on the assumption that a tiny change to a state is the same is no change and thus an an accumulation of tiny changes is also no change. I just don't accept the base premise. The common sense arguments with grains of sand in a pile, trees in a forest etc. just seem to rely on the vagueness of definition allowing individual judgement to place the threshold at different places.

[brudgers]

The sorites paradox depends on a slight of hand -- applying the pedantry of logic to ordinary language. Or to put it another way, like a pun or double entendre it is naught but clever word play. The language game falls apart in technical contexts, for example there's no sorites paradox for heaps in computer science.