5 ms·

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 l

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
    I'm curious, could you list the things that you think Anns can do that underpin your argument?
- audunw 8y ago
  Well, that might just be because there's not actually much to say about consciousness. If you strip all the things we know it's not (memory, thoughts, etc) we're actually left with very little, if anything. 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.
  - jacobsimon 8y ago
    Even when you strip out those other concepts, which you probably shouldn't, there is an underlying element of conscious awareness that is not "nothing," but an awareness of nothing, like the "I" in "I think therefore I am." My problem is that people confuse talking poetically about consciousness with actually coming to a conclusion about how this thing works.
hyperpallium 8y ago
Like Fourier analysis, every component sine wave is conscious, and every possible superposition of sine waves is also conscious. It's turtles all the way down. 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.
- hackinthebochs 8y ago
  But at this point, what are you actually saying? What does turtles-all-the-way-down consciousness actually pick out? I have a hard time seeing it as informative. That is, the statement "everything is conscious" is doing no work for you in describing the thing in question.
  - hyperpallium 8y ago
    I'm merely elaborating/expanding to show the extremity of "everything is conscious".
- steve76 8y ago
  How about the opposite? Everything is a consequence of human consciousness.
- paraschopra 8y ago
  > 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?
  - hyperpallium 8y ago
    For sure. The one thing it does is "solve" the problem of consciousness in a surprising, entertaining, and absurd way.
paraschopra 8y ago
Like most philosophies, pansychism has multiple flavours. To me, the combination problem is concrete. The physical location of my awareness seems to be inside the head and not my hand, even though both are made of atoms. ‘Everything is conscious’ fails to account for that.
- warent 8y ago
  The only reason your awareness seems to be inside of your head is because your head and face is your primary interface with the world, where the core of your senses reside and is, therefore, your default state. 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.
  - adrianN 8y ago
    I doubt that meditation techniques would allow you to stay conscious after something destroys your brain.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Center of awareness isn't about where you have your CPU (that's always in the head) - it's about where your perceived "self" is. I remember reading from his biography that Feynman successfully learned to move it around, within and outside of his body, through those meditation techniques. This neatly accounts for OOBEs, making them nothing special too. 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.
      - blechinger 8y ago
kirre245 8y ago
Maybe I misunderstand the concept, but when we are newly born we are somewhat not conscious in the usual sense of self. In that theory does it mean we, or our atoms are already conscious but we dont have the awareness yet? Because our brain is first producing a trick of the perception of self once it is fully developed? 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?
- goldenkey 8y ago
  You are hitting the right target. Looking at recurrent neural nets. Finite impulse responses. A consciousness experience is merely a transformation of external reality over time and space. It can tangle the left leg with the thumb, the past with the present. For simple entities, like electrons, their lack of memory means that entanglement will be extremely basic. For more complex things that involve more tangled transformations of reality through space and time, thatll mean a greater amount of awareness of the center of that tangle. 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..!
  - enangel 8y ago
    You just rediscovered Freud.
seventhtiger 8y ago
I like it aesthetically, but fundamentally I think it dodges the question. It dilutes consciousness to be mostly unconscious, and then it can be applied to anything. 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.
simonh 8y ago
If these conscious experiences of particles are entirely encapsulated within them, and not manifested in their external behaviour, then I don't see how any form of aggregate consciousnesses could form. If the atoms of my body are conscious, what does that have to do with the consciousness of my brain? It can only be relevant if those consciousnesses interact or merge or coalesce in some way, and how can they do that without interacting beyond the interactions described by physics? 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.

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
  I'm curious, could you list the things that you think Anns can do that underpin your argument?
audunw 8y ago
Well, that might just be because there's not actually much to say about consciousness. If you strip all the things we know it's not (memory, thoughts, etc) we're actually left with very little, if anything. 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.
- jacobsimon 8y ago
  Even when you strip out those other concepts, which you probably shouldn't, there is an underlying element of conscious awareness that is not "nothing," but an awareness of nothing, like the "I" in "I think therefore I am." My problem is that people confuse talking poetically about consciousness with actually coming to a conclusion about how this thing works.

hyperpallium 8y ago

Like Fourier analysis, every component sine wave is conscious, and every possible superposition of sine waves is also conscious. It's turtles all the way down. 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.

hackinthebochs 8y ago
But at this point, what are you actually saying? What does turtles-all-the-way-down consciousness actually pick out? I have a hard time seeing it as informative. That is, the statement "everything is conscious" is doing no work for you in describing the thing in question.
- hyperpallium 8y ago
  I'm merely elaborating/expanding to show the extremity of "everything is conscious".
steve76 8y ago
How about the opposite? Everything is a consequence of human consciousness.
paraschopra 8y ago
> 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?
- hyperpallium 8y ago
  For sure. The one thing it does is "solve" the problem of consciousness in a surprising, entertaining, and absurd way.

paraschopra 8y ago

Like most philosophies, pansychism has multiple flavours. To me, the combination problem is concrete. The physical location of my awareness seems to be inside the head and not my hand, even though both are made of atoms. ‘Everything is conscious’ fails to account for that.

warent 8y ago
The only reason your awareness seems to be inside of your head is because your head and face is your primary interface with the world, where the core of your senses reside and is, therefore, your default state. 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.
- adrianN 8y ago
  I doubt that meditation techniques would allow you to stay conscious after something destroys your brain.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Center of awareness isn't about where you have your CPU (that's always in the head) - it's about where your perceived "self" is. I remember reading from his biography that Feynman successfully learned to move it around, within and outside of his body, through those meditation techniques. This neatly accounts for OOBEs, making them nothing special too. 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.
    - blechinger 8y ago

kirre245 8y ago

Maybe I misunderstand the concept, but when we are newly born we are somewhat not conscious in the usual sense of self. In that theory does it mean we, or our atoms are already conscious but we dont have the awareness yet? Because our brain is first producing a trick of the perception of self once it is fully developed? 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?

goldenkey 8y ago
You are hitting the right target. Looking at recurrent neural nets. Finite impulse responses. A consciousness experience is merely a transformation of external reality over time and space. It can tangle the left leg with the thumb, the past with the present. For simple entities, like electrons, their lack of memory means that entanglement will be extremely basic. For more complex things that involve more tangled transformations of reality through space and time, thatll mean a greater amount of awareness of the center of that tangle. 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..!
- enangel 8y ago
  You just rediscovered Freud.

seventhtiger 8y ago

I like it aesthetically, but fundamentally I think it dodges the question. It dilutes consciousness to be mostly unconscious, and then it can be applied to anything. 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.

simonh 8y ago

If these conscious experiences of particles are entirely encapsulated within them, and not manifested in their external behaviour, then I don't see how any form of aggregate consciousnesses could form. If the atoms of my body are conscious, what does that have to do with the consciousness of my brain? It can only be relevant if those consciousnesses interact or merge or coalesce in some way, and how can they do that without interacting beyond the interactions described by physics? 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.