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Panpsychism is exciting. But there are two problems in it. One is the combination problem: what sort of collection of atoms are conscious and what are not. If y

Panpsychism is exciting. But there are two problems in it. One is the combination problem: what sort of collection of atoms are conscious and what are not. If you propose then that only agents or complex systems are conscious, you are faced with the second problem: the boundary condition. What do you call an agent, and why? 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.

trixie_ 8y ago
I think panpsychism argues that everything is conscious, at all levels, simultaneously. There are no boundaries. What you experience as a boundary is just the limit of your awareness. Just as you don't consciously beat your heart or heal your wounds. And if you think about it a lot it's tough to really tell where your own boundary brain/body ends and the environment begins. 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..
- jacobsimon 8y ago
  I don’t disagree with the problems you describe, but I don’t think panpsychism explains any of these problems either. It’s a non-answer, and functionally equivalent to saying nothing about consciousness. The “evolutionary illusion” you describe is precisely what we’re trying to understand: the brain is doing an extraordinary magic trick and no one knows how.
  - trixie_ 8y ago
    Given what artificial neural networks are already capable of, it shouldn't seem like a magic trick what our own brains are capable of (from the outside). 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.
    - dEnigma 8y ago
      Simply answering a question with "Yes" without providing evidence or a deeper explanation seems pretty useless and like no additional knowledge was gained.
      - trixie_ 8y ago
        Pansychism seems to explain a lot of the hard questions. Even without a deeper understanding than 'there is a single conscious and you are a piece of it', simply thinking that way changes the understanding of life/death. You are unknowingly everyone. Punching a guy is on some level punching yourself. The afterlife is irrelevant, when you die you go on existing as the other 7 billion humans, plus animals, etc... This is why philosophers and neuroscientists alike a so excited about the idea and writing papers about it.
    - sgt101 8y ago
lisper 8y ago
We humans draw this boundary all the time. We do it based on an entity's I/O behavior, and in particular, the complexity of interactions that it is possible to have with it. 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.
- paraschopra 8y ago
  Curious: why do you say pansychism is absurd? Red colour is something which has sort of become a canonical example of subjective experience. Nothing special about it - could have been blue :)
  - lisper 8y ago
    Because it's just obvious that consciousness and subjective experience are not properties of matter, they are properties of very particular arrangements of matter. A CPU is made of the same stuff as beach sand, but a CPU can compute and beach sand can't. Or take your laptop (or your brain) and hit is with a sledge hammer. All of the atoms that were there before this procedure are still there after. Do you really want to argue that nothing essential is lost in this process?
    - kamaal 8y ago
      That means this has more to with ability to communicate/signal your consciousness. For example if a rock is conscious, how would it inform us that it is? 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.
ddingus 8y ago
Would one not just infer the universe is conscious? 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.
- paraschopra 8y ago
  > When something has enough complexity to be aware of the boundary between "it" and everything else, then we have a being of some kind. 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.
  - ddingus 8y ago
    Interesting thoughts. 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.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
pcpcpc 8y ago
For anyone else reading this comment and curious about Buddhism and Panpsychism, here are some links. Buddhism suggests that the perception of the boundary of the self (I am a distinct, separate being) is a delusion/wrong view. Perhaps we experience a shared universal consciousness (with discreet elements?) passing through ourselves like a river with drops of water flowing through it, evaporating, and then falling somewhere far away? "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-neuroscience-universal-nature-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-no-rebirth/comment-page-1/ https://engagedharma.net/2017/07/05/thich-nhat-hanh-there-is... More here... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism_and_Western_philosophy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism_and_Western_philoso... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism
- Ste_Evans 8y ago
  Excellent! Thanks! Do you have any links for those curious about witchcraft and voodoo?
  - pcpcpc 8y ago
    Ask and you shall receive: "Followers of voudon also believe in a universal energy" https://www.ancient-origins.net/history-ancient-traditions/origins-voodoo-misunderstood-religion-002933 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-panpsychism-new-materialism-the-rights-of-nature-a-new-ecology-for-mankind-neopaganism-and-old-religions-on-contemporary-issues/ https://konekrusoskronos.wordpress.com/2013/01/26/gaia-panps...
simonh 8y ago
Your use of the term agent is I think telling. An agent is something that acts, and in this context I think it's fair to extend it to say that it acts consciously, yet under panpsychism all these conscious particles are not agents in any active sense at all. Their ‘awareness’ is a hidden variable with no external consequences, because all of their interactions are deterministic as described by physics. A 'conscious' photon doesn't decide to interact with an atom, or choose to be reflected or not by a semi-mirrored surface. 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.

trixie_ 8y ago

I think panpsychism argues that everything is conscious, at all levels, simultaneously. There are no boundaries. What you experience as a boundary is just the limit of your awareness. Just as you don't consciously beat your heart or heal your wounds. And if you think about it a lot it's tough to really tell where your own boundary brain/body ends and the environment begins. 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..

jacobsimon 8y ago
I don’t disagree with the problems you describe, but I don’t think panpsychism explains any of these problems either. It’s a non-answer, and functionally equivalent to saying nothing about consciousness. The “evolutionary illusion” you describe is precisely what we’re trying to understand: the brain is doing an extraordinary magic trick and no one knows how.
- trixie_ 8y ago
  Given what artificial neural networks are already capable of, it shouldn't seem like a magic trick what our own brains are capable of (from the outside). 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.
  - dEnigma 8y ago
    Simply answering a question with "Yes" without providing evidence or a deeper explanation seems pretty useless and like no additional knowledge was gained.
    - trixie_ 8y ago
      Pansychism seems to explain a lot of the hard questions. Even without a deeper understanding than 'there is a single conscious and you are a piece of it', simply thinking that way changes the understanding of life/death. You are unknowingly everyone. Punching a guy is on some level punching yourself. The afterlife is irrelevant, when you die you go on existing as the other 7 billion humans, plus animals, etc... This is why philosophers and neuroscientists alike a so excited about the idea and writing papers about it.
  - sgt101 8y ago

lisper 8y ago

We humans draw this boundary all the time. We do it based on an entity's I/O behavior, and in particular, the complexity of interactions that it is possible to have with it. 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.

paraschopra 8y ago
Curious: why do you say pansychism is absurd? Red colour is something which has sort of become a canonical example of subjective experience. Nothing special about it - could have been blue :)
- lisper 8y ago
  Because it's just obvious that consciousness and subjective experience are not properties of matter, they are properties of very particular arrangements of matter. A CPU is made of the same stuff as beach sand, but a CPU can compute and beach sand can't. Or take your laptop (or your brain) and hit is with a sledge hammer. All of the atoms that were there before this procedure are still there after. Do you really want to argue that nothing essential is lost in this process?
  - kamaal 8y ago
    That means this has more to with ability to communicate/signal your consciousness. For example if a rock is conscious, how would it inform us that it is? 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.

ddingus 8y ago

Would one not just infer the universe is conscious? 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.

paraschopra 8y ago
> When something has enough complexity to be aware of the boundary between "it" and everything else, then we have a being of some kind. 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.
- ddingus 8y ago
  Interesting thoughts. 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.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

pcpcpc 8y ago

For anyone else reading this comment and curious about Buddhism and Panpsychism, here are some links. Buddhism suggests that the perception of the boundary of the self (I am a distinct, separate being) is a delusion/wrong view. Perhaps we experience a shared universal consciousness (with discreet elements?) passing through ourselves like a river with drops of water flowing through it, evaporating, and then falling somewhere far away? "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-neuroscience-universal-nature-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-no-rebirth/comment-page-1/ https://engagedharma.net/2017/07/05/thich-nhat-hanh-there-is... More here... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism_and_Western_philosophy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism_and_Western_philoso... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism

Ste_Evans 8y ago
Excellent! Thanks! Do you have any links for those curious about witchcraft and voodoo?
- pcpcpc 8y ago
  Ask and you shall receive: "Followers of voudon also believe in a universal energy" https://www.ancient-origins.net/history-ancient-traditions/origins-voodoo-misunderstood-religion-002933 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-panpsychism-new-materialism-the-rights-of-nature-a-new-ecology-for-mankind-neopaganism-and-old-religions-on-contemporary-issues/ https://konekrusoskronos.wordpress.com/2013/01/26/gaia-panps...

simonh 8y ago

Your use of the term agent is I think telling. An agent is something that acts, and in this context I think it's fair to extend it to say that it acts consciously, yet under panpsychism all these conscious particles are not agents in any active sense at all. Their ‘awareness’ is a hidden variable with no external consequences, because all of their interactions are deterministic as described by physics. A 'conscious' photon doesn't decide to interact with an atom, or choose to be reflected or not by a semi-mirrored surface. 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.