Re:Electrons May Well Be Conscious
by sitkack on Monday May 18, 2020 @12:13AM
(#23218256)
Big corporations have a mind, but they aren't conscious in the way we are conscious. Lot more minds exist in the world than consciousness.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
this is actually one of the problems I have with the theory that everything is conscious. The electron, like the company, is actually an abstraction and part of a model. We don't even really know if an electron is 'a thing in itself'. Maybe everything is just strings or quarks, or some other smaller particle or just the manifestation of some field (sorry I'm not a physicist in case I'm butchering the analogy).
Even every individual human could be said to be some sort of zoo of 'conciousnesses'. Panspychism posits that consciousness is essentially smeered across the universe like a sort of paste, and if consciousness applies down the ladder I don't see why it doesn't apply upwards.
I think what you're lacking, if I recall correctly about panpsychism, is that only self-organized systems are conscious - not everything.
A computer, birds nest, a gun, a space ship: such things aren't self organized, therefore not conscious.
A cluster of cells, a planet, a star system, a galaxy, they are self organized therefore, permeated by consciousness.