I like the panpsychism stuff because it resolves some other problems as well 'the transporter problem' - are you the same person after transporting star trek style? Under panpsychism it doesn't matter because you are unawarely everything anyways.
Also the 'the split problem' - say I separated you atom by atom to create two new people with half your parts - which one would you be? or both simultanously? or none? Panpsychism makes answering these questions easy as it argues that you are unawarely both.
A lot of people are trying to explain how we are discreet entities that arise from non-discreet pieces. Trying to figure out where boundaries end/begin. When do you become conscious. What is conscious and what is not. The paysychism theory explains all these things in the other direction by saying nothing is discreet. The sense of discreetness may as well be an evolutionary illusion for the survival of my bag of atoms.
Who knows what is true though, it'd be a breakthrough if there were a way to experimentally validate any of these theories..
The hang up is on the inside right? You have an essence to your consciousness experience that you believe a fly, bacteria, rock, computer, artificial neural network may or may not have.
Panpsychism does answer that question by saying yes, they all have some sliver of consciousness. Two atoms bumping together at some level experience the interaction.
I agree the theory doesn't have answers as to how or what the essence of consciousness is. But I definitely seeing it as a stepping stone towards that goal.
I think this is also what some meditation based philosophies are trying to teach. That is, they're saying something along the lines of: you are in one way everything at once, but you are not any of the things you think you are. They spend a lot of effort trying to teach people, essentially nothing. Not just the label "nothing" but something like a deep realisation of the concept.
My main problem with this philosophy is figuring out why we're conscious of a very specific subset of things at a time. Does the brain create a kind of nexus where several items of complex information are available in a small physical, and that makes it easy to be conscious of these things at once? But what limits it?
And the other problem is the link between consciousness and action. Most actions seem like a product of cause-and-effect.. but at the very least it seems that the existence of consciousness is making us talk about consciousness.
My problem is that people confuse talking poetically about consciousness with actually coming to a conclusion about how this thing works.
In the spiritual world many advanced people have had these experiences of oneness with the world once they learn to fully strip the mind from all conditioning and cocneption of self. So it seems to me like the concept of embodied swlf and consciousnes are two things that can be seperated. Does that make any sense?
For us, the center of the tangle is our bodies, located, and present. But like you said, babies are very much just passthroughs like the electron. The only difference is that they are storing a ton, the storage just isnt being used in any capacity, its passively sitting there. As the storage begins to become used, and sent to interfere with the present and future inputs, then self awareness results in the form of the intersection.
Good observations..!
I like the idea that everything is conscious, but without diluting what consciousness is. It's anthrocentric and magical, thinking that atoms have inner monologues and concepts of self, but it's better defined than the panpsychist consciousness as you describe it.
You can test this hypothesis by practicing a meditation technique called "body scanning" where you allow your awareness to focus into various parts of the body, leaving your head and indeed entering your hand for example.
As an aside, I wonder if Helen Keller's default location of awareness was in her hands because they were her interface with the world? It seems unlikely to me that it would be in her head/face but I really have no idea.
EDIT: to be clear, I'm arguing that the perceived location of your "self" is just that - a perceived location. An arbitrary frame of reference that defaults to one's head, but can be moved around. I.e. something worthless as evidence for panpsychism.
That one can do things such that it _feels like_ one’s consciousness is elsewhere, seems to go against that point?
Though, a similar point of “if a person loses their head, their consciousness seems to go away. Their hands do not move independently.” And “ If, as panpsychism claims, their hands are also conscious, what must it be like for their movement to be directed by consciousness outside of itself?”
I'm trying to argue against panpsychism by noting that the place where it "feels like" consciousness is is completely arbitrary and one can learn to move it around, so this feeling is useless as evidence for panpsychism.
Reminds me of the scene in Ex Machina where he cuts himself to make sure he still bleeds - a physical realization of a turing test.
Ask some small children where their self is, and some of those who haven't be told much about the brain will point to the chest or another location.
Clearly my consciousness has physical consequences. I am an active agent and act consciously. Therefore if my consciousness is composed of these, then the consciousness of those particles must have physical, measurable consequences that should be testable.
The fact that this line of reasoning is entirely absent from any of these philosophical ruminations is I think telling.
What does it mean for an atom, an electron, a sine wave to be conscious? What can it perceive, consider, how can it act? But those are awarenesss, reason, agency... distinct from "consciousness".
Just because an entity cannot assert itself, does not mean it is not conscious.
This does not give any more purchase on the world than we currently have. It’s similar to saying that just because we have never seen laws of physics change, it doesn’t mean they can’t change. Of course, that may or may not be true. But would you bet on sun not rising tomorrow? New scientific theories / entities must have give us additional predictive power (grip) than what’s currently possible. Otherwise why invent new assumptions?
"Dogen, the founder of Soto Zen Buddhism, went so far as to say, “All is sentient being.” Grass, trees, land, sun, moon and stars are all mind" https://www.lionsroar.com/christof-koch-unites-buddhist-neur...
"It’s like a cloud. Even when the cloud is not there, it continues always as snow or rain. The cloud does not need to have a soul in order to continue. There’s no beginning and no end. You don’t need to wait until the total dissolution of this body to continue—you continue in every moment." https://engagedharma.net/2017/07/05/thich-nhat-hanh-there-is...
More here... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism_and_Western_philoso... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism
Yes, with just different perspectives - I figure it's all just a projection of it's vibrations.
"Followers of voudon also believe in a universal energy" https://www.ancient-origins.net/history-ancient-traditions/o...
"Many Neopagans worship Gaia... Gaia was the great mother of all... However, the goal-directed behavior of the biosphere, as explained by the Gaia theory, is an emergent function of organised, living matter, not a quality of any matter. Thus Gaia theory is more properly associated with emergentism than panpsychism... Panpsychism also plays a part in Hindu, Buddhist, Dzogchen and Shinto mysticism, and for that matter in most if not all Animistic Native Religions, and Mother Goddess Cults, like Pachamama, in the Andes, Rhea, for the Greeks, Durga, or Kali for the Hindus, Nerthus, for the Germanics, Dea Matrona, for the Gauls, Ninhursag for the Sumerians, Tuuwaqatsi for the Hopi, Nut, or Isis for the ancient Egyptians, etc. It will be hard to find a place on Earth were the ancient goddess has not being worship." https://konekrusoskronos.wordpress.com/2013/01/26/gaia-panps...
There is no boundary problem then, just one of degree.
Seems silly, but everything has a point of view and whatever level of complexity it has determines what consciousness it presents.
A rock has very little complexity. It literally is just an expression. What has happened to it equals what it is.
When something has enough complexity to be aware of the boundary between "it" and everything else, then we have a being of some kind.
Little organisms, insects, plants, all continue to present surprising behavior to us. Bees can do basic math, what nothing is.
And plants. They are slow, by their nature, but we are finding they communicate in ways.
Animals are a lot like us, just simpler.
>It’s exciting times! Let’s hope that we’re able to get a grip on this question of why we have this subjective experience of red colour.
Seconded. We may find there are rules, that experience may be predicted, or at least better understood.
Exactly. This agency idea is appealing because it seems to unify a number of other ideas: from evolution (survival), autopioesis, active inference and Bayesianism. Without sounding too much of a crackpot, I hope we’ll be able to import subjective experience as a necessary component in the universe.
I personally hope they are not as subjective as we see today. Perhaps there are reasons why, say red, appears as it does.
A ruleset there would, to me at least, be profound. While it may remain impossible to directly convey thoughts, impressions, we may well end up with far better language to work with and see commonalities we do not today.
Re: agency
A thing aware it is a thing, may be the root of real AI too.
I have long thought these disjointed, brain in a jar essentially, experiments lack that. No body, no closed loop with themselves, no sense of being = no agency.
We may also find intelligence is rooted in an interest, need to exist, or just be an expression.
By that, I mean what I did above. A rock is essentially what has happened. Information in matter form, a record.
Agency, is meta. Beings see expressions, the world, and due to their nature, being sufficiently complex, have an interest, themselves, their kind, apart from the world and it's undulating history.
Not necessarily. Humans learn anything through inputs of sight, sound, feeling and smell. Different conscious bodies could have different ways of learning about things around them, and hence a totally different model of reality around them.
They can't tell us anything about their consciousness for the same reasons why we can't talk to stones.
How they get the data is a matter of their nature, not whether they are beings.
I also did not speak to their state, only what may define actually having one, as opposed to being something simpler, an expression as I put it above.
We can get the message of the stone, the stone also is changed by us having done it. It literally is what happens to it.
There is that.
But if that is so, how can assemblies of such particles form any kind of aggregate consciousness? How can the conscious experiences coalesce if they cannot interact? If the interactions of the particles are described only by physics, as seems to be the case, then the fact they are individually conscious in some sense is irrelevant because that can have no consequences for the behaviour or even the ‘experience’ of the assembly. Imagining otherwise is to invoke some sort of psychic or spiritual connection, but then if that connection has any physical consequences at all then it can’t really in any meaningful way be separate from physics. If it's not separate, then it's measurable and we should be able to make falsifiable claims about it and tests for it.
So I don’t see how this flavour of panpsychism (dual aspect monism) can actually help illuminate or resolve the problem of _our_ consciousness at all, or any of the philosophical problems and questions associated with it, even in principle.
Agency is not a binary quantity. A normal adult human is an agent, and a blastocyst is not, but there is no bright line where agency is bestowed. It happens gradually.
None of this is a deep mystery. The only thing that is mysterious is how the transition happens. But panpsychism is just absurd.
Just out of curiosity, why did you pick "red color" as your canonical example of subjective experience? The reason I ask is that it seems to pop up much more often than random chance would predict.
Red colour is something which has sort of become a canonical example of subjective experience. Nothing special about it - could have been blue :)
Without the ability to communicate, consciousness means nothing at all. Then of course communicate how? Hand signals, hand writing or voice are equally mystical forms of communication given that these are waves(light and sound). That's already Telepathy category. We just don't feel it as magical because every one can do it.
I'd imagine for a humanoid species without ears or even a idea that something like sound wave would exist, talking would be synonymous with Telepathy.
Communication is the only data you have to support the theory that there are conscious beings other than yourself. Hypothesizing a conscious being that can't communicate at all (not to be confused with the temporary inability to communicate brought on by sleep or locked-in syndrome) is like hypothesizing an invisible leprechaun living in your pantry.
I’m ultimately hopeful that subjective experience will come to be seen as something fundamental. But the difficulty is that we can’t just make up new entities / concepts in the world that don’t agree with current scientific facts. So such a science of consciousness has to be compatible with modern findings of neuroscience and psychophysics.
It’s exciting times! Let’s hope that we’re able to get a grip on this question of why we have this subjective experience of red colour.