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Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

• xtacy 7y ago
  There's an interesting podcast where Philip Goff and Sean Carroll discuss about various aspects of panpsychism. Sean plays a very good devil's advocate, so if you enjoy a nice friendly critic of the above ideas, I highly recommend this episode! https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2019/11/04/71-philip-goff-on-consciousness-everywhere/ https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2019/11/04/71-p...
  • russdill 7y ago
    The list of guests on that podcast is just astonishing. From Thorne to Grimes, MacFarlane to Greene, from wine to robot abuse. Never fails to impress.
• asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
  Even the theory's advocate acknowledges in this interview that it's untestable. There is no way to observe that the world would behave differently whether or not the theory is true. If that's so, I can't think what point there is discussing it, except as a mental exercise. If you can't test a theory, that means it can't affect anything. I.e. it has no practical use, except as a form of entertainment. I would almost argue that it doesn't make sense to talk about something being true or untrue if it cannot be tested nor used to make any predictions. The whole concept of truth, for me, reflects the extent to which reality conforms to belief. So if there isn't and will never be a way to test a belief, then it's neither true nor false. IMO, this is the type of thinking that gives philosophers a bad rap.
  • bobobooey 7y ago
    Just because the observable world is testable doesn't mean that subjectivity doesn't hold any value.
    • asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
      Yeah, and I never claimed that. There's plenty of value in the subjective. For example, I liked this movie more than that one. My tastes are subjective, and yet I find value in them. But this philosopher's claim isn't subjective. It's not "hey I think it would be cool if all matter were conscious." It's a pseudo-factual claim about consciousness. It's not subjective at all. It's just neither wrong nor right. It would be like me claiming that there exists a being called "god" who has never and will never interact with this universe in any way. You can't predict anything based on this pseudo-factual claim, which means (IMO) it has no real truth value. On the other hand, it's definitely not a "subjective" viewpoint as most people conceive of subjectivity.
      • mapcars 7y ago
        >There's plenty of value in the subjective But in turn I can say everything you know and experience about the world is subjective. It came through your senses and you have no way to know if it was the same with other people.
      • mcbits 7y ago
        In these discussions, "subjective" and "objective" are jargon. "Subjective" basically means existing only from the point of view of an observer. "Objective" means existing independently of any observations or experiences. For example, playing a video game, there is some kind of objective physical activity occurring in reality. Subjectively, you perceive a cartoon world with Mario bouncing around on koopas. If the CPU has its own subjective experience of the very same objective physical phenomena, it probably doesn't involve the perception of Mario and koopas. I think there is probably tremendous value in figuring out what it is about the universe that enables these different subjective experiences, when and how they arise, how they're similar and different, etc.
  • mapcars 7y ago
    The consciousness itself (not the theory) is in the root of what we perceive and exercising it effectively broads our perception of reality which is the single most practical thing one can do because everything else we do is limited by our perception.
  • ptah 7y ago
    > that means it can't affect anything it can still affect how we interact with the world
  • Razengan 7y ago
    How do you define "practical use?"
  • npo9 7y ago
    > There is no way to observe that the world would behave differently whether or not the theory is true. If that's so, I can't think what point there is discussing it, except as a mental exercise. This is a very materialistic view of the world. By this measure we shouldn’t talk about religious ideas or discuss the (non-monetary) value of art. I have great respect for science, but I think there are things worth discussing that fall outside of science.
    • asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
      Art has plenty of value, in that people enjoy it. This theory probably has some value, in the same direction. Some people just enjoy talking about these philosophical ideas. It's hard to exactly word my objection. I feel like people view philosophers as being in pursuit of the truth -- trying to understand and reason about how reality is. They have this reputation in a way that's entirely different from the reputation of artists, who folks generally recognize as producing work that is not claiming any kind of authority about reality. At one point in time, that may have even been the case. But I think, at least for philosophers who promulgate ideas like this one, the level of authority should be similar to that of an artist, or maybe a poet. The philosopher is not talking about reality, he's just putting some words together in a way that is interesting to some people. (Your view of religion, IMO, both shortchanges it and gives it too much credit. I suspect most religious adherents would at least claim to believe that their religion does make predictions about reality that are or at least will be testable. Perhaps you won't be able to conduct that test while living, or at the present time. But at least most sects of Islam and Christianity expect that the god of their religion will at some point impinge on our material reality, and has done in the past. I am less familiar with Shinto, Buddhism, and Hinduism, but I'd be surprised to hear that most adherents of these religions view their religion's claims as generically and permanently untestable.)
  • sanxiyn 7y ago
    I believe there can be better and worse explanation, even if they predict the same. I think interpretations of quantum mechanics are of this kind.
  • bcmo 7y ago
    I think philosophy has to find gaps in what science can do in order to justify its existence. Some things are untestable -- what are we supposed to do with those things? There are qualitative and normative problems that science can't help us with. I generally agree with you though -- we'd be better off if we just focused more on science, and describing things accurately, instead of just coming up with wild ass ideas. But it still is good to acknowledge and be aware of known limitations with that approach.
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
    Consider the following: your consciousness, that experience you have of being, the one that --in the minds of many-- separates you from a computer programmed to behave like you, cannot exist under your model because it cannot be tested for. Consider also that this statement is ridiculous, because you clearly do have an experience of being. What does this tell us? Empiricism and the scientific method are a philosophy for modelling reality, and they've undoubtedly done a bang up job of progressing human understanding, but that model is also incomplete. Think of it like Newtonian gravitation, another undoubtedly very useful model that, it turns out, is also incomplete.
    • asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
      I can generally agree that something like consciousness exists, because I seem to be experiencing it. The test of that fact is ongoing, as I type these words, and it continues to be true. I suspect, based on the fact that other people act like me and all also claim to be conscious, that they are having internal experiences similar to mine, although I can't know for sure. So I don't agree that consciousness in general can't be tested for. We can test our own consciousness, and we can use induction to guess that at least other humans are experiencing something similar.
      • AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
        But you can't measure it objectively. You can't tell me that other people have consciousness, you just assume it is true because they seem to be like you. You have no mechanism for determining the limits of your assumption and indeed past societies have drawn the line in even narrower constraints than "human".
        • asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
          > you just assume it is true because they seem to be like you A minor, but important point. I don't assume it's true. I just think it is more likely than not. I suppose that the philosopher I'm talking about could say the same of their theory. And I guess that's OK, if all they're claiming is that this is something that seems likely. My only response to that would be that his induction is prima facie questionable to me.
  • mxcrossb 7y ago
    > I would almost argue that it doesn't make sense to talk about something being true or untrue if it cannot be tested nor used to make any predictions. The theory can’t be tested by experiment, but I do think it can be critiqued in terms of internal logical consistency. In that regard, a well structured theory of consciousness could have powerful structure, and much like abstract mathematics lead to practical results.
  • devit 7y ago
    Even if two theories make the exact same predictions, believing or giving more attention to one or the other can change how the brain operates, making it more or less efficient at some tasks and eliciting different emotions. For example, the interpretation of natural numbers as sets in set theory and as strings of decimal digits is equivalent and gives the same results, however for most people seeing numbers as naturally being strings of decimal digits is likely to make them faster at doing arithmetic and making decisions based on numbers. Likewise, seeing other people as conscious or unconscious results in the same predictions about their behavior, but seeing them as conscious might make most people more efficient at cooperation with other people. In this case, seeing all matter as conscious might make someone feel less special, and thus have less attachment to their identity and spend less effort acting in a way that preserves it.
  • Veedrac 7y ago
    Consciousness is empirical, since you can talk about it. Therefore if panpsychism is not empirical, it's wrong.
  • claudiawerner 7y ago
    >Even the theory's advocate acknowledges in this interview that it's untestable. There is no way to observe that the world would behave differently whether or not the theory is true. Mathematics is also "untestable" in the same way. You can't observe that the world would behave differently whether or not 2=2 or 1=2. Does this make mathematics practically useless, except as a form of entertainment? Furthermore, why is entertainment spoken of as a lower purpose than "practical uses"? I very much doubt you'd want to live in a world without such "entertainment".
• arnoooooo 7y ago
  I think non-duality / advaita makes much more sense than panpsychism, as it requires less assumptions while remaining compatible with our experience. Panpsychism seems like a bandaid to solve the hard problem of consciousness, which non-duality does not suffer from.
  • empath75 7y ago
    > Panpsychism seems like a bandaid to solve the hard problem of consciousness It doesn't even do that, it just pushes it down the stack. If I ask, why is the sky blue, I don't want to hear "Because it's made of blue stuff." Not only is it wrong, it doesn't have any explanatory power at all. Ultimately if you want to understand why something has a certain property, you want to know how it arises from the emergent behavior of something more fundamental. A hurricane isn't made of hurricane bits, and brains aren't made of consciousness particles.
    • mapcars 7y ago
      >If I ask, why is the sky blue, I don't want to hear "Because it's made of blue stuff." Well, you are not going far if you hear only what you want to hear. PS sky is blue because you perceive it as blue.
      • skywhopper 7y ago
        You missed the meaning of that idiom entirely. They don’t want to hear “because it’s made of blue stuff” because it’s wrong and useless, not because it is distasteful.
        • mapcars 7y ago
          I don't think I missed anything, if you already decided what is wrong - this is not a honest search - you just want to find something which satisfies your views.
          • robbrown451 7y ago
• empath75 7y ago
  This is textbook God of the Gaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps It adds nothing to our understanding of the universe, but it gives some people a warm and fuzzy feeling.
• ajuc 7y ago
  Mu. The definition provided ("consciousness is experience") explains nothing, you cannot experimentally decide if atoms experience anything, the fact that they do or don't doesn't change any prediction for how they behave over time. It's meaningless, like wondering if magic exists but is actively hiding from us. Paranoia is that way. > Despite great progress in our scientific understanding of the brain, we still don’t have even the beginnings of an explanation of how complex electrochemical signaling is somehow able to give rise to the inner subjective world of colors, sounds, smells and tastes that each of us knows in our own case. There is a deep mystery in understanding how what we know about ourselves from the inside fits together with what science tells us about matter from the outside. We can make a very simple robot that reacts to the environment - for example follows light and learns where the walls are so as not to collide with them in the future. It checks all the boxes that simple life does - if you say that a bacteria experience world then so does that robot. So it is conscious but we know where it comes from - it comes from the computational power and interactions with the world it can do. There's no magical spiritualism around it, it's just nested if-then-elses + memory + feedback. Which btw is as good a definition for consciousness as any other. When you become unconscious the feedback loop is interrupted. > “Of course, you can’t do that. I designed physical science to deal with quantities, not qualities.” "Quantity has a quality of its own". There's no qualities in the universe, just quantities and we arbitrarily assign labels (qualities) to them. In the end I think "is X conscious" is as productive a question as "is Pluto a planet" or "can submarines swim".
  • fredgrott 7y ago
    not to mention the simplest one celled animals do exhibit thinking problem solving functions despite not having neurons
  • platz 7y ago
    I think you are simplifying the concept of consciousness a bit too much and are too hard in the paint for a very un-nuanced interpretation of behavioralism. Your position would be better described as consciousness is an illusion or consciousness does not exist. It has compelling elements but I find it a hard sell.
• fsiefken 7y ago
  Read Bernardo Kastrup's, a Dutch computer scientist and philosopher, criticism on panpsychism: "https://www.bernardokastrup.com/p/papers.html https://www.bernardokastrup.com/p/papers.html https://iai.tv/articles/will-we-ever-understand-consciousness-auid-1288 https://iai.tv/articles/will-we-ever-understand-consciousnes... https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/emtud2/bernardo_kastrup_on_consciousness_panpsychisms/ https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/emtud2/bernardo... He proposes an alternative answer for the mind-body problem; idealism instead of materialism https://www.bernardokastrup.com/p/papers.html https://www.bernardokastrup.com/p/papers.html
  • mark_l_watson 7y ago
    +1 for Kastrup. I have read two of his books and his reconciling modern physics with spiritualism is in accord with my beliefs. Personally, I believe that our universe and possibly many universes in the multi-verse is teaming with life in many planets. Also, just my personal belief, but I think their is some universal creative force/consciousness.
    • dwnvoted2hell 7y ago
      Why do we vote for things that align with our beliefs? Shouldn't we instead vote for the things that challenge us to better understand the truth regardless of what our personal beliefs happen to be? Not saying your beliefs are wrong, just potentially your actions.
  • fjfaase 7y ago
    Joscha Bach has an interesting take on how to combine idealism with materalism. See for example his 'The Ghost in the Machine' talk at 35C3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3K5UxWRRuY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3K5UxWRRuY
  • monktastic1 7y ago
    For some reason I enjoy trying to share intuitions for idealism. Let me try to do so here. First, notice that it's impossible to prove which metaphysics (materialism, idealism, solipsism, Last Thursdayism, simulationism...) is correct. Next, notice that the situation is even worse: you can't even assign probabilities to those possibilities without making assumptions about whatever is "outside" reality -- which are by definition untestable. Now, notice the strong urge to throw your hands up and say "since I can't know, I should just default to the most obvious choice" (which usually ends up being materialism). Avoid this devious trap! It's keeping something hidden. Next, notice the one thing you can be sure about: the present sheer fact of experiencing something. Notice the mind's attempts to explain it. If you introspect carefully enough, you'll discover that thought isn't the most fundamental capacity you have: "pure consciousness" is. Consciousness takes the form of thoughts -- as well as all sensory perceptions -- and shapes itself into the experience you call "me and my life." You discover that thoughts can no more point at consciousness than a mouse pointer can point at the vibrant pixels it's made of (but boy, do they keep trying). And yet, somehow, consciousness can know itself non-dually and im-mediately. At some point, the intellectual knowledge that you cannot assign probabilities to metaphysics finally penetrates your core, and there's a mind-shattering "aha" moment that turns your reality inside-out. Various traditions call this "awakening." You do not awaken. "Reality" or "consciousness" awakens to itself, rediscovering its primordial freedom. Then maybe you go about preaching a philosophy of consciousness-only. Or maybe you just live the best and most loving life you can, knowing that in an impossible-to-communicate sense, we are all the one Love appearing as many.
• slumdev 7y ago
  This is bad philosophy masked in scientific jargon.
• m4r35n357 7y ago
  I am more interested in the nature of consciousness than its location . . . not sure where this idea could lead.
• jjmorrison 7y ago
  Why so much dislike for this? It's a theory that pushes on some of the foundational assumptions we make. Maybe it resonates and maybe not. But just being open to a new set of ideas means we can maybe learn something new and interesting. Or not and that's fine too. People seem angry that someone else would talk about an idea they don't currently agree with.
  • ajuc 7y ago
    It uses handwavy definitions, it's untestable and makes a lot of assumptions without providing any new predictions.
    • bsenftner 7y ago
      It is an attempt to extend the hard sciences into a non-quantitative domain. Consider it early work that might become something like quantum mechanics, but being early, the terms and definitions are still finding their foundations. This is the point where great careers are made, if you're brave enough to dive into the unknown and use your mind for solving truly unknown questions.
    • platz 7y ago
      Nothing about the topic consciousness is fundamentally testable. Which is why it's often a topic for philosophy rather than science.
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      • arnoooooo 7y ago
        Actually, we all have consciousness, and can therefore experiment. A lot of experiments have been done about consciousness through meditation, psychedelics, etc.
        • rabbitonrails 7y ago
          How do you know that I am conscious?
• dilap 7y ago
  An interesting thought experiment is to imagine an incredibly-detailed computer simulation of a brain, down to the level of individual cells and neurotransmitters. (While this is beyond our current capabilities, it is in principle possible.) Hook the brain up to some decent IO devices, and you’d have an extremely human-like “AI”. (I’m glossing over some tricky details like, do you start with a fetus/baby brain and let it grow up, or somehow clone an existing brain...tricky no doubt, but again, in principle solvable.) So the question is, this simulated brain, which is behaving very similarly indeed to a biological brain: does it have consciousness? Does it feel? On the one hand, you might argue of course not, it’s just a computer; computers “obviously” don’t have feelings. It’s just bunch of bits. A precise collection of patterns of electrical charges evolving in time according to rigid rules. On the other hand, is our own biological brain any different? We don’t think of a few cells as having consciousness, but somehow the broader collection does. Can the biological substrate of the complex arrangements really matter? Maybe consciousness is like a “soul”, it’s a completely untestable, untouchable “ghost” that can inhabit anything. So maybe everything really does feel, in its own way? Maybe my computer already has some form of consciousness...
  • platz 7y ago
    If you create zombies people are going to be upset with you.
    • ngvrnd 7y ago
      only if they can tell.
  • JumpCrisscross 7y ago
    > down to the level of individual cells and neurotransmitters My guess? No, it won’t be conscious or even meaningful. More fundamentally, our inability to answer this question drives at our ignorance of our own neurology. We don’t know the building blocks of thought. It might happen at the neurochemical or electrochemical level. It may even depend on quantum effects.
    • 7y ago
• xamuel 7y ago
  This is the exact wrong direction we should take if we want to have any hope of understanding consciousness. Rather than pass a bong around and declare the whole universe is conscious, we should question the consciousness even of entities whose consciousness we currently take for granted. We should ask: is it really true that all humans are conscious[1], or is there something specific that triggers consciousness? For example, maybe consciousness is caused by a certain benevolent bacteria living in our guts, and anyone without that bacteria isn't conscious. If we refuse to even question these things, then of course we'll never come up with any answer. [1] Of course, it goes without saying that for ethical purposes we should act under the assumption that all humans are conscious.
  • darkhorse13 7y ago
    Spoken like the stereotypical materialist.
    • xamuel 7y ago
      Was Jesus Christ a materialist? "Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead." (Matthew 8:22)
      • sambull 7y ago
        No, but some use what people say are his teachings as reasons to prop up their extraction of resources,materials/creating materialist things from the earth; as according to interpretations of their versions of that teachings their god has given them dominion to use all the resources. Dominion of all things: "And God blessed them, and God said unto them, "Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth."" King James, Genesis 1:28 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_theology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_theology
      • arnoooooo 7y ago
        Actually, he was, and Abrahamic religions are probably the reason for materialism in science. It all starts with the distinction between heaven and the earth, the spirit and the flesh… Abrahamic religions are fundamentally dualistic, by contrast with eastern religions like hinduism or buddhism wich have had the concept of non-duality for long. My understanding is that the only places you find a form of non-duality in Abrahamic religions is in their mystical variants.
• Magodo 7y ago
  Mildly relevant: Peter Watts' novel Blindsight
• arethuza 7y ago
  Isn't this the idea behind Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials?
  • SamBam 7y ago
    He talks about Dust giving everything consciousness, but I don't recall that he ever really goes into the details of what that means.
• cvaidya1986 7y ago
  "The Spirit Atma by which all this universe is pervaded, is indestructible. No one can destroy the imperishable Spirit." - Chapter 2 Yoga of Knowledge Sankhya Yoga Verse 17 48 "There is nothing higher than Me, O Arjun. Everything in the universe is strung on Me, the Supreme Being Para- Brahma Paramatma, like jewels are strung on the thread of a necklace." Chapter 7 Knowledge & Wisdom Verse 07 254 String theory? searchgita.com appstore.com/searchgita
• leroy_masochist 7y ago
  > There is a profound difficulty at the heart of the science of consciousness: consciousness is unobservable. You can’t look inside an electron to see whether or not it is conscious. But nor can you look inside someone’s head and see their feelings and experiences. We know that consciousness exists not from observation and experiment but by being conscious. But can't we measure brain waves with CAT scans? Isn't there research going on now into observing brain patterns and actually figuring out what the subject is thinking about in real time? Perhaps this lines up another distinction between the thinking mind and actual consciousness.....but I'm not really convinced by the argument that consciousness is an unobservable black box.
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
    > But can't we measure brain waves with CAT scans? Isn't there research going on now into observing brain patterns and actually figuring out what the subject is thinking about in real time? But what does that have to do with consciousness (the experience of being)? All it shows is that our brains work the same way machines do, which isn't really a surprise. We can use a logic probe on machines and figure out how they work too. There is no way to determine if something experiences the world around it or "merely" is a product of a complex mechanism of reactions and interactions. That's what is meant by consciousness being unobservable.
• odyssey7 7y ago
  Is the progression toward the heat death of the universe a result of innumerable suffering particles steering themselves in ways that minimize their pain? Should we as humans accelerate the heat death of the universe to end subatomic suffering? Or is gravity their preferred route? Being together. Maybe the answer is funneling all of the universe into black holes. Diamonds are very stable. Does this mean their particles are very happy? Is converting your loved one's remains into diamonds the greatest thing you can do for them, or is this reasoning flawed and is the eternal stasis a bad thing?
• snissn 7y ago
  https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lfAhup-fDYs https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lfAhup-fDYs Same guy was on Sean Carroll's podcast. His arguments didn't resonate with me very well.
• _Microft 7y ago
  Sabine Hossenfelder's opinion on pan-psychism and why it can't be true from a physics standpoint: https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/01/electrons-dont-think.html https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/01/electrons-dont-thi...
• aldoushuxley001 7y ago
  It always amazes me how much people refuse the reality of consciousness. Just goes to show you the mental gymnastics people will use to contort themselves in order to maintain some semblance of coherency in their world view.
• dvt 7y ago
  > Panpsychism gives us a way of resolving the mystery of consciousness, a way that avoids the deep difficulties that plague more conventional options. Eh, not really. With panpsychism you end up with, e.g. human, consciousness often becoming an emergent property of complex-enough systems. But in reality, you might have systems that are quite complicated (say, more complicated than a brain even) that aren't conscious. I do think that consciousness is most likely a "foundational" property of our universe, but the argument that "everything is conscious" (even to a tiny degree) doesn't seem very useful.
• rmah 7y ago
  And to think that I used to have great respect for Scientific American magazine. This article is the worst sort of pseudo-intellectual tripe. It uses fancy-schmancy academic language to dress up silly ideas and wordplay. Masking itself in the facade of reasonableness to make hand-wavy conjecture and baseless assertions. Moreover, many of the supporting points made by Goff are simply wrong, betraying his ignorance of our current understanding of nature. I'm saddened that SA has published this.
  • ncmncm 7y ago
    I am too. Even just publishing it in their forum is destructive for science.
    • nprateem 7y ago
      Yes I really wish they wouldn't challenge my conventional idea of materialism. The last thing we need is another Einstein coming along making us think differently.
• keiferski 7y ago
  Heh, that's a funny coincidence. I was just reading about panpsychism (and some variations of it) earlier today, specifically this article on forgotten philosopher James Ward: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/james-ward/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/james-ward/ It seems really alien to our current mental metaphysical model, but if you study the subject and analyze the arguments, it's not as absurd as it seems. It's important to realize that when philosophers use the word "conscious" they don't generally mean "awake" or "aware" in a human-sense; virtually no one is positing that a rock is conscious in the same way a human being is. Perhaps the main reason why panpsychism fell out of favor among philosophers and philosophers of science in the last century is due to the increased popularity of positivism and the linguistic turn. I'm not sure if panpsychism is necessarily a path forward in terms of describing the universe, but I think it seems promising in terms of a prescriptive use of creating, or attempting to create, new consciousness with machines. Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/
  • sebastianconcpt 7y ago
    Not sure if can even be attempted. If turns out to be a phenomenon that originates in a sub-Plank's scale then "machinery" isn't something conceptually possible there.
    • mnowicki 7y ago
      If consciousness, or any phenomenon that effects our physical world in a way we can perceive, originated from some mechanism that takes place on a sub-plank scale, then I think that it would be conceivable for some super advanced machinery to be able to effect or even replicate said phenomenon. Just not with our current level of technology
      • sebastianconcpt 7y ago
        Well, semantics are stretching at that level a bit because while at sub-Plank it would still be technique/technology involved, I'm not 100% sure it can be called machinery. I don't discard that it could be machinery at our newtonian scale that creates an environment where that ultra-micro thing happens tho.
• Stierlitz 7y ago
  > Does Consciousness Pervade the Universe? NO! > Where does consciousness come from? Emergent properties of a functional brain.
  • ryeights 7y ago
    Why such a quick dismissal? We have virtually zero evidence one way or the other. Calling consciousness an “emergent property” is a cop-out answer. What, materially, is that property, what physical laws explain it, and by what mechanism does it emerge from mere electrical impulses?
    • Stierlitz 7y ago
      > .. What, materially, is that property .. Synapses firing .. > .. what physical laws explain it .. Physics .. > .. and by what mechanism does it emerge from mere electrical impulses? Through the senses and acting on the environment through muscles triggered by synapses firing.
      • mooseburger 7y ago
        Heard of the China brain thought experiment? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_brain https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_brain Would such a brain be conscious? Why or why not?
        • Stierlitz 7y ago
          > Would such a brain be conscious? Why or why not? If the brain was stimulated by inputs from the surrounding environment then YES!
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
    How functional must a brain be? We know that we can remove at least half of a human brain and still have a somewhat functional person. Where is the line drawn?
• wruza 7y ago
  Honestly “consciousness” is not a good term for this phenomenon. It is much more “observeness”, and here is why. If we suppose that not all things have such a property, these things can still be complex enough to exhibit the behavior similar to those who have it. E.g. someone who is me could not have it, could simply exist and write this message, but “real me” would mot be a thing. I can imagine other people, but I’m not them. What happens when I die? There still are other people. Now switch me with any of them and you’ve got a world without “me”. The phenomenon is real, as we can detect it with an intelligence and discuss (otherwise no one would understand me). But it is not necessary, nor provable that it drives our behavior or it feels and experiences events. It observes us, we observe it and this observer meta-identifies with a body that is aware of the idea, like a fixed point in calculus. So (imo) it is not a physical control, feedback or consciousness, but a symbiosis of physical and “observing“. Anyway, I can’t see why we should dismiss it and move on, like some people suggest. It may be a key to something important about reality.
• kypro 7y ago
  Am I the only one who thinks the consciousness question is really quite easy to understand and answer? The illusion of consciousness is obviously beneficial. For example, I could tell a computer, through the use of sensors, to report that it's in pain when it's hit. But you wouldn't take it seriously, or care for its suffering, because it hasn't also declared that it is under the illusion that its suffering has a kind of physical manifestation in its mind. The reason we care more about animals today than in the past is because we finally began to question whether or not they had a similar sense of self as us - perhaps when we are cruel to animals they don't just know they're in pain and understand like a computer might that pain is bad, but their brains actually tell them they are physically feeling a sensation of pain. Similarly, I presume if an AI ever said it had a similar physical experience of pain to us then we would considering treating that AI with similar regard to that of a human. If I'm correct, then an illusion of consciousness makes complete evolutionary sense. It's not really consciousness, but a sense of self, and more importantly, a sense that there are others with a similar sense of self to our own. Our consciousness is just our brains saying you're a real thing that thinks and feels. It's a lie our brain tells us that our pain and the pain of others is important and worth caring about.
  • danharaj 7y ago
    How do you define an illusion without first positing a being that can experience (hence conscious) an illusion? What does it mean that consciousness is a 'lie our brain tells us', who are we? Are you assuming some form of cartesian dualism, or perhaps you are making a sort of homunculus argument? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homunculus_argument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homunculus_argument
    • sebastianconcpt 7y ago
      Right, the illusion hypothesis isn't consistent and also can't explain Qualia.
    • kypro 7y ago
      By illusion I just mean there isn't really a physical pain (sub atomic elements don't feel pain) but our brains still act as if we experience pain from the perspective of a self. From this perspective the self is a real thing, you are a conscious human, not a collection of atoms - you matter more than your matter. Let me try this another way... Imagine an identical universe with one difference - no one is conscious. If I decide to kill in this hypothetical universe is it wrong? And even if you say yes, is it equally as wrong as in a universe with conscious beings? This is the explanation for consciousness and why the illusion is important. We think we're aware of our senses and in control of our actions, but we know we're not. We know what we consciously obverse is different from the input we get from our sensory organs - which is the reason things like optical illusions exist. We also know that we subconsciously make our decisions a fraction of second before we're consciously aware of them. In my opinion this all points towards consciousness being an illusion, rather than an actual awareness of self.
• deleted 7y ago
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• amiune 7y ago
  Give me a precise definition and I'll give you a precise answer. Can you write that question in mathematical notation? If not then don't expect a precise answer
• titzer 7y ago
  It all rests on what your definition of consciousness is. Philip: > But when I use the word consciousness, I simply mean experience: pleasure, pain, visual or auditory experience, et cetera. But that just kicks the can again. What is "experience"? What is pain versus pleasure? Ultimately we have to arrive at a reductionist definition that doesn't reference undefined terms. After many years of thinking about this problem, here's my best shot: Experience is equivalent to state change, e.g. the state change induced in a thermometer or a radio receiver due to stimuli. Consciousness is ultimately a system of modeling that is complex enough to have developed a model of itself, thus "realizing" that the system is separate from the environment that produces stimuli. Humans arrived at consciousness through evolving larger and larger brains whose main goal is to model the environment and behavior of other individuals in order to predict what will happen next, in order to make plans for survival. Panpsychism is then scientific, and perhaps inescapable, if we use these definitions. But, it doesn't mean that rocks and black holes are conscious. Only those things that undergo state change in response to stimuli and are complex enough to have models of themselves. There is no evidence that rocks have information-processing capabilities at all, and worms' brains are too small to have a model of themselves, however simplified.
• crazygringo 7y ago
  Consciousness is obviously a property of the universe somehow, or else humans couldn't have it in the first place, since we're part of the universe. I've long assumed it has to be something that appears qualitatively like magnetism -- no large-scale effects in most materials, but when small-scale elements of certain types are configured/aligned in certain ways, presto it appears. And that brains evolved such a configuration because consciousness must have conferred certain evolutionary benefits. But it's not clear to me whether that is considered panpsychism, though. Because it doesn't imply that e.g. rocks have any meaningful level of "consciousness" any more than most rocks would be considered magnetic.
• yannis 7y ago
  Monadology (French: La Monadologie, 1714) which is one of Gottfried Leibniz's best known works representing his later philosophy has pretty much the same arguments. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monadology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monadology
• mfritsche 7y ago
  Information is dark matter. Absence of information is dark energy. A shower thought of mine...
• javajosh 7y ago
  Oh, it's cool the universe (both laws and initial energy/mass distribution) provides a mechanism to blow things apart and squish them together on so many time scales and in so many ways. The universe is so dead and cold overall, but extraordinarily verdant in places like Earth, a tiny place in a sliver of time. I don't think it's consciousness (or some form of entelechy) built into space-time. It's more like a kind of complexity-seeking at the several interlocking scales in a gravity well that happens to sit in some ambient heat.
• glr 7y ago
  Panpsychism is also supported by Integrated Information Theory. So far it is probably the most fruitful attempt to mathematically describe consciousness.
  • hackinthebochs 7y ago
    Panpsychism isn't really supported by IIT, at least not any version of panspychism that is resurging. IIT says the organization determines the level of consciousness. Panpsychism has no theory for how organization increases or combines conscious properties of the individual conscious units of matter.
• aabeshou 7y ago
  is it just me or is there something on this website that makes scrolling the page unusable?
• Analemma_ 7y ago
  Here’s my problem with panpsychism: I don’t understand why it isn’t immediately self-refuting via Ockham’s razor. What I mean is, my understanding is that panpsychism posits that all matter has some degree of consciousness somehow, i.e. even an atom has a little bit, humans just have a lot more. Fine. But clearly this property isn’t simply additive: panpsychists don’t argue that a Solar System-sized collection of ping-pong balls has more conscious experience than a human being. However this property agglutinates, it has to be something more than just “amount of matter”; it has to be some function of which matter and how it is arranged. But that’s just the materialist position! “Matter can make conscious systems if and only if it’s arranged in a particular way (possibly, but not necessarily, meaning a way that involves simulating a Turing machine)” is materialism. At that point, the fundamental quanta of consciousness is an unnecessary addition to the theory that can be discarded with no difference. I fully grant that I’m a programmer with very little philosophical background, but I just don’t get what the panpsychist hypothesis buys us that we didn’t already have.
  • nprateem 7y ago
    > But clearly this property isn’t simply additive: panpsychists don’t argue that a Solar System-sized collection of ping-pong balls has more conscious experience than a human being I think the main difficulty of this argument is that consciousness can only be experienced by the experiencer (mediation/drug-induced experiences aside). Therefore how can you tell how conscious the Solar System, a horse, mouse, atom, etc. is if you can't communicate with them to ask?
• carapace 7y ago
  ORT (Only Read Title) There's a riddle in the Gospel of Thomas[1]: "Make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside." Here's an interpretation: "inside" and "outside" refer to the inner world and the outer world. These share some qualities or aspects, both are known only subjectively, and there's a similarity of form (there are e.g. red triangles in both worlds) and susceptibility to will (we can move our bodies and we can affect what we imagine, aka the faculty of imagination. Both of these abilities present the same problem: what is intention and how does it relate to will to cause changes in perception?) Otherwise they are very different. The outer world is made of matter/energy in various configurations and, while we don't (yet) know what the inner world is made of, it's obviously very different than matter/energy. Perhaps the main difference is that you can more-or-less manipulate the contents of imagination (I'm using the word here as a proxy for the whole of internal world) "at will" but the contents of the real world obey a physics that dictates that you more-or-less have to push things with other things to get anything in particular to happen (please forgive my gross simplification.) Now consider the subjective experience of an omnipotent, omniscient being. If you can know and alter the "outer" world just as easily as you can know and alter the "inner" world, wouldn't they effectively be the same? In the context of a Gnostic tradition, I think it means that, when one unifies the self with the Self the "real" world and the "imaginary" world also become one. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Thomas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Thomas
• alacer 7y ago
  I tend to think consciousness is universally fundamental and effectively intrinsic, since all we can know is our experience that requires it. That's why we can never get behind consciousness, as noted by Max Plank in 1931. (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Max_Planck https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Max_Planck)
• karmakaze 7y ago
  I'm trying to be open-minded and make sense of the position. The first big leap is considering experience to be a continuum from humans down to inorganic matter. This is stretching the meaning of 'experience'. If I walk on snow, does it experience deformation, or does it just deform? The second leap is saying science only tells us what matter does and not "the intrinsic nature of matter: what matter is, in and of itself." I can't see how this gets you anywhere, you can say it's anything and it's self-satisfying. The Hollywood ending really lost me. Let's just sweep this consciousness problem into a tiny tiny place and call it intrinsic: "So it turns out that there is a huge hole in our scientific story. The proposal of the panpsychist is to put consciousness in that hole. Consciousness, for the panpsychist, is the intrinsic nature of matter."
  • russdill 7y ago
    If you'd like to hear someone who disagrees with Goff discussing the idea, I'd highly recommend his podcast with Sean Carroll: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2019/11/04/71-philip-goff-on-consciousness-everywhere/ https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2019/11/04/71-p... A somewhat similar discussion is here: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2020/01/06/78-daniel-dennett-on-minds-patterns-and-the-scientific-image/ https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2020/01/06/78-d...
  • uoaei 7y ago
    > If I walk on snow, does it experience deformation, or does it just deform? For me, some of the "making sense" about a position like this is in terms of such dichotomies. The important part is that this description applies equally to all members of the continuum, e.g., "if 'I' like a song, am 'I' experiencing happiness or is 'my' electrochemical clump of 'me' just reacting?"
    • DonaldFisk 7y ago
      Both. Your electrochemical clump of you just reacting causes you to experience happiness.
  • Lambdanaut 7y ago
• anentropic 7y ago
  no-one knows...
• Veedrac 7y ago
  Panpsychism is incredibly silly. It's just obfuscated dualism. It literally doesn't explain anything, and it's obviously wrong for the simple reason that it gives no way to explain why humans act on their conscious experience and have it modelled internally as a conscious experience. The brain's use of electrical pulses or DNA doesn't result in an innate internal model of electricity or DNA. Similarly, if a proton has ‘experience’, then clearly ‘experience’ is a property completely outside of the computation the mind performs, and so we should not have introspective awareness of it. (Or rather, if we were to, the question of why would be no easier than the original Hard Problem.)
  • uoaei 7y ago
    > for the simple reason that it gives no way to explain why humans act on their conscious experience and have it modelled internally as a conscious experience. The theory doesn't purport to explain internal models nor awareness in any sense that we're used to it. That is a separate question. If you are looking for those answers, they will be found in how the machination of "conscious" behavior accumulates sufficient complexity to look like directed actions from the outside.
    • Veedrac 7y ago
      You're right, but only in the sense that panpsychism doesn't answer any questions. Literally any. The only thing it does is split the question of ‘where does human consciousness come from?’ into ‘how does human consciousness reduce to proton awareness?’ and ‘where does proton awareness come from?’ But you'll note that this is a harder question than the original, since it postulates more and conflicts with more evidence.
      • uoaei 7y ago
        Indeed. If we accept panpsychism, then the "hard problem" of consciousness morphs into the hard problem of how awareness arises, and what degree of awareness and understanding is present in a given individual.
  • keiferski 7y ago
• tus88 7y ago
  > That’s what panpsychists believe. Why is it we can't discuss ideas without labeling someone as a -ist of some kind?
• EGreg 7y ago
  What if our ideas about consciousness were an artifact of our language? Just like our ideas about morality? Where a lot of the time if you are explicit all the “mystery” goes away? So when you say an ought statement “A should do B”, what you really mean is “A should do B if A wants C to happen” which expands to “If A does B and C doesn’t happen, then any D can’t blame A if D wants to be rational”. It’s a bit self referential like that. Ok so now everything suddenly becomes clear and you find you can’t formulate a single basic question about morality in English that doesn’t have an obvious answer. “You should do your homework! Unless you don’t care about your grades.” or “You should be consistent! Unless you don’t care about being viewed as a hypocrite.” What if things simply were, and scrupulously including unspoken clauses made all basic questions about consciousness have obvious answers? “What is it like to be a bat” is not a well formulated question. However, try including the subject and object of the sentence all the time. The bat saw the phenomenon The bat’s body experienced a feeling And so on. Then the question comes down to two things: 1) Identity. That is a mental construct that organisms develop. It can have a lot of layers, such as how you see yourself, how you choose to express yourself, etc. But the biggest one is how you identify with the person you were a few years ago and with who you will be in the future. If you were gonna go on a vacation for 2 weeks but later not remember anything about it, does it matter where you go? Do you do things just to make your 80 year old self proud to remember them? And so on. 2) Existence. Yes actually the word existence has no well-defined meaning without resorting to conscious observers. Consider the question of whether the Harry Potter World exists or not. How is it different than not existing or a made-up work like blabladeblaa? The sentence “the Harry Potter World Really Exists” has almost no meaning without resorting to consciousness, we are just used to saying that word. Be thorough and you’ll always invoke yourself and your conscious awareness. Now what if life never arose in the universe? In what sense would the universe exist any more than a Harry Potter world? So in a way, the concepts of existence of consciousness are duals of each other! People often think that the concept of existence is something fundamental. But it is really a dual of the concept of consciousness.
• throwawaymanbot 7y ago
  We are just electrons effecting electrons.
• snambi 7y ago
  Why does "panPshychism" sound like the idea of "Brahman" from Veda? Is it same as Brahman? If not, what is the difference?
• uoaei 7y ago
  I think there's a lot of homo-exceptionalism in the challenges to this hypothesis. What I mean by that is, everyone is incredulous that stones can have the same experience as humans, but consider it the other way around: humans have essentially the same experience as stones. Both react to the physical processes happening at their peripheries in dynamically-consistent ways, i.e., computing a quasi-deterministic function. The conclusion then is that since we are conscious, there's no reason that stones couldn't also be. It's a matter of degree, encoded in the complexity of that quasi-deterministic function mentioned above. The main difference between us and stones is that, in order for our DNA to have arisen and propagated itself this far, it had to have a strong set of skills to survive over the history of the universe. It can literally create lumps of proteins that achieve that goal. For the body of the animal, being aware of its own history by constructing a self-consistent and closed narrative arc (the 'I' that we all contend and interact with) obviously has advantages, since it would be hard to operate in society without pre-defined and agreed-upon roles, which we assume as our identity. So the fact that we experience reality as such, with our emotional reactions and persistent self-narrative, is an evolved trait which helped the human genome become the dominant life form on Earth.
• uoaei 7y ago
  Another point to make on panpsychism: how do people who reject the theory explain hierarchical life? To what level is a human conscious if its component cells aren't? Are ant colonies "conscious" due to the complexity of the behavior of the ants? Does that make ants less conscious? To an alien visitor, ant colonies can be considered single organisms, because they act with intent toward a specific goal and react to specific stimuli in semi-predictable ways. Extend this to human nation-states: is the USA "conscious"? It certainly has motivations, and a drive for self-preservation, and exerts directed will. Even if the component humans are not explicitly "aware" of the "thoughts" of the USA, can you disqualify consciousness? Honestly, to me, this perspective demotes consciousness to obscurity. There's nothing special about it because it's everywhere. What is interesting is an explicit awareness and accurate internal model of reality. But this is a completely separate problem to that of consciousness.
  • zackmorris 7y ago
    That's a good point. One things aliens have that we don't is the ability to merge and divide consciousnesses (like Vulcans do). This has been explored in science fiction but not so much in the real world. Although some siamese twins share a consciousness: https://www.cbc.ca/cbcdocspov/features/the-hogan-twins-share-a-brain-and-see-out-of-each-others-eyes https://www.cbc.ca/cbcdocspov/features/the-hogan-twins-share... Within the next 10 or 20 years, we'll have the technology to connect brains to computers, and eventually join brains together and separate them. That will at least give us a theory of how the basic building blocks of consciousness work, perhaps along the lines of how people can lose an entire hemisphere of their brain and still be conscious. Maybe we'll find that only a tiny golfball-sized portion of the brain is required for consciousness. Maybe something smaller. For example, the twins obviously have their own personalities, but how much of that overlaps into a single definition of self? It could be that there are always two entities. But my gut feeling is that we'll find that consciousness can merge and divide fairly effortlessly, working like a fractal to retain full memories from both halves. It will be a strange experience (a bit like psychedelics) but within a century will be commonplace.
    • zajd 7y ago
• Altheasy 7y ago
  Pure nonsense theory
• philodelta 7y ago
  Broadening the definition of consciousness to the literal limits seems pointless, it dilutes the already difficult to manifest definition of consciousness to complete uselessness.
• gaius__baltar 7y ago
  Do you remember when this philosophy was called animism?
• visarga 7y ago
  No, consciousness can only appear in self-replicating systems, unless it is artificially supported (as in AI). Without self-replication there is no genetic evolution, and without evolution there can be no consciousness.
  • plutonorm 7y ago
    Why? Why does evolution have something to do with consciousness?
    • visarga 7y ago
      Without evolution there would not be the necessary brain power to ask this smart question, to begin with. Evolution is a gradient-free, population based algorithm that optimises the survival of genes. This is slow learning. On the other hand we have brains and senses - that is fast adaptation. Both have the same purpose - to support life and by necessity, self replication. I think it's a good rule of thumb - where there is consciousness there must be self replication. That would eliminate theories such as panpsychism and give consciousness an intrinsic purpose.
• mnowicki 7y ago
  I believe time is intrinsically linked with our experience of consciousness, maybe consciousness in general. Sorry for the armchair philosophy, this is a topic I like to think about. We know that time is the 4th dimension, all things exist in 4-dimensions and we just experience one 'slice' of this dimension at a time. The concept of something having 'not happened yet' really means 'we haven't experienced it yet' - it'd be like saying that the house 5 blocks away isn't on fire 'yet', simply because we haven't walked 5 blocks over and seen it yet. If we were able to move through time as freely as we move through other dimensions, then a house that catches on fire 'tomorrow' is really on fire 'now'('now' really isn't the right word here, but I don't think a better one exists) - we just have to walk down the street into tomorrow and see it. In this way, we also exist as infants and as old men and women at the same time. We experience on infinitesimally small slice of ourselves at a time, each slice being a moment in time. Why don't we experience this all at once? Our body IS existing in the past and the future and the now, we are all tasting our 60th birthday cake right now, but we don't experience it yet. There are two possibilities: Consciousness is the one thing that exists outside of time, such that instead of existing throughout our whole lifespan consistently and experiencing our whole life at once and constantly, we move through time experiencing one moment at a time, and maybe move into and out of time via birth/death. If you start thinking about memory this gets very interesting(as does the other possibility) in so far as memory is represented by the physical state of your brain and memory stores 'past' events. Basically implying that for some reason the 4D shape of your brain is such that on the 'future' side of your brain there are neurons arranged in such a way to describe what the state of your brain is on the 'past' side. OR, consciousness does exist within 4 dimensions as our bodies do, and we ARE experiencing our entire lives at once. I don't know about you, but for me it FEELS like I'm only experiencing this single moment right now. But that doesn't mean I'm not also experiencing every other moment right now. At this moment in time, my brain is in a certain state(in terms of neurons and neurochemicals), that state encodes my memories and feelings that I have at this moment, personally I think that state encodes all the qualities of my consciousness, but I know this could be argued. So if I were experiencing all moments at once, then this moment would feel exactly like it would feel if this were the only moment I was experiencing. I would also be experiencing moments in the future, and in those moments this moment would be just a memory. So how do I know whether I'm experiencing those other moments as well right now, this current moment clearly feels unique to me and it seems like the only moment I'm experiencing, but maybe that's how all moments feel. Maybe there is a different 'me' experiencing every other moment right now, and I happen to be in this moment typing this message BECAUSE this moment IS the one where I happen to be sitting here typing this message. The me that's eating my 60th birthday cake is also doing that right now, and not thinking about the nature of consciousness, but maybe has a vague memory of this moment because the physical structure of my brain encodes 'previous' brain states as memories in 'future' brain states for whatever reason.
• YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
  Panpsychism is interesting but I'm not convinced. If I can summarise the idea it's answering the question "how can consciousness arise from unconscious matter (like the human brain)" with "it can't, matter is already conscious (i.e. it has conscious experience)". It's a very simple explanation, a very Occamist explanation. But at the same time it is not _really_ an explanation. It just pushes the question back from "how can complex matter like the human brain be conscious?" to "how can simple matter like quarks be conscious?". But panpsychism does not even attempt to answer the further question- it's simply ignored. That is, panpsychism says that "matter is conscious" but it doesn't say _why_ matter is conscious, or what exactly consciousness _is_ after all. It just passes the buck. So it's not very different than answering the question with "because God willed it". I mean, that's an answer too. It's a metaphysical answer- but so what? Panpsychism is not metaphysical but it's not more explanatory than God. Not until it explains _what_ consciousness is and _why_ quarks have it.
  • deleted 7y ago
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• DesiLurker 7y ago
  My only concern with the consciousness debate is purely from a self-preservation PoV. Here is a scenario to elaborate: 1) In fifty years compute horsepower is enough to be able to fully simulate a brain. 2) population of earth is 10B and climate change is really making the planet unlivable. 3) we believe that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon 4) we decide we'll invest in computronium and just continue our (& other species) lives in cyberspace 5) civilization opts-in to shed the mortal coil and jump to cyberspace. now at this point some super advanced quantum computer realizes that wait a minute, we made some subtle mistake and there does seems to be something else (perhaps quantum) aspect to consciousness that we missed. so now essentially we have committed genocide on ourselves. I just want to be really really really sure that there is nothing else to consciousness before I give in to the 'emergent consciousness thesis'. Personally, I like Roger penrose's 'Orchestrated objective reduction' theory of consciousness where he posits that proto-consciousness is an innate property of universe due to quantum wavefunction collapse. so essentially everytime there is a wf collapse its like the system had a conscious moment. human brain is just an instrument complex enough to 'catch' phenomena and turn it into a conscious experience. The 'how' part is where it gets murky, there have been some attempts to link it to microtubules in brain cells but nothing concrete yet. IMO its worth a serious look from biochemistry point of view.
  • Psyladine 7y ago
    What was genocide if the idiots went to live in computer 'heaven' with catgirl maids and whatever other narcissistic fantasies they cooked up? You're saying like we build a plane to go to mars and then once in space the computer discovers it needs air to move and now we're fucked... why does your first posit on magic petaflops not translate into effective reading of the brain and how it works?
    • DesiLurker 7y ago
      >> You're saying like we build a plane to go to mars and then once in space the computer discovers it needs air to move and now we're fucked... thats inaccurate description of what I said, its more like .. well for a topic like this there really are no good analogies. but to elaborate further (as i hinted) it could be something related to a quantum mechanical state which when you measure you effectively destroy the system and now all you are left with a hollow shell that acts and responds just like the original (so from others pov its the same person, mostly) but in itself its like a psychological zombie. now whether or not it is 'you' (assuming you are the person transported) is again a matter of it being emergent property or innate one. which was the whole point to begin with. simply put, at what resolution a simulation of you becomes 'you'? is it a question of resolution or is there something else to it? given the fact that there are many biological processes that utilize quantum mechanics why is it so far fetched to imagine that consciousness itself could be rooted in QM? >> What was genocide if the idiots went to live in computer 'heaven' with catgirl maids and whatever other narcissistic fantasies they cooked up? If I were to put you in a coma like sleep and then by some pending technological breakthrough cookup whatever fantasies you desire to play eternally in you 'sleep', does that makes it okay? is it same as being alive? I dont think so, even if you are okay with it.
• phs 7y ago
  I recently finished watching Prof. Patrick Grim's excellent Mind-Body Philosophy[0] course, which helped me clarify my own position. I thought that it fit reasonably well under the term "panpsychism", but this article is making me think it may be something slightly different. Under the expectation that it has already been studied, I'm now curious what it is named. In short, I am a computationalist[1]: consciousness is a pattern that may appear in physical processes. I expect it can be translated into different physical processes. I think the definitional boundary separating conscious processes from other processes is subjective, even if there are common landmarks we generally agree are on one side or the other. That seems all well and good. However I am not a hard materialist[2]: I do not believe that physicalism addresses the hard problem of consciousness[3]. I like to note this by the absence of timelessness in my experience: the present moment seems to be distinguished from the perceived past and future only because I am experiencing it. Contrast this to a physical description or model of myself and my surroundings that seems sound without reference to a specific "present" moment. To see that such a model does not contain a "now", think about simulating it: you would need to choose a moment on the timeline to start, to insert a "now". Physical models don't seem to capture the notion of "present moment". Attempts to shoe-horn it in (with e.g. consciousness particles or what have you) seem simultaneously untestable and offensive to Occam's razor. Subjective experience then seems to be unaccounted for. I am content saying it is not found in any model of physical processes, only in the physical processes themselves. Notice I am no longer talking about consciousness: the computation and brain state is still susceptible to description. Only the subjective experience, whose toe we can catch with the present moment, escapes. Odd as it might sound, I find it tempting to say that the subjective experience is not personal. It seems incommunicable, but what I mean is that there is no aspect of myself in it: that's all over in the computation (incidentally I am reminded of one of the objections to "Cogito, ergo sum"[4].) At this point, the idea of "Atman"[5] is starting to look pretty good (thank you those who found the Adviata link, I would not have.) However, besides Prof. Grim's touch on the topic I know nothing about it (haw). My impression of Atman is that it is ineffable, primitive and pervasive. It does not have a location because it is not a thing: it is an aspect of reality. And now we arrive at panpsychism, or at least what I thought panpsychism is. Subjective experience, but not the computational content that gives rise to the more visible parts of consciousness, is a fundamental aspect of reality. Rocks have subjective experience. Rocks are not conscious, unless they include physical processes we choose to recognize as consciousness. A rock's subjective experience is a lot like your subjective experience of the IR spectrum, assuming that you are like me and have no qualia affected by it. [0]: https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/mind-body-philosophy.html https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/mind-body-philosophy... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_theory_of_mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_theory_of_mind [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito,_ergo_sum#Use_of_%22I%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito,_ergo_sum#Use_of_%22I%2... [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advaita_Vedanta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advaita_Vedanta
• yummypaint 7y ago
  This hits at a long standing question ive had about how consciousness arises. Its clear that it results mechanistically (obeying physics) from complex systems of simple components. The big question in my mind is whether it arises with a sudden jump (like a phase transition) or if its truly a continuum. I think mathematics may prove much more useful at disentangling this than the article implies. "Erdős and Rényi (1960) showed that for many monotone-increasing properties of random graphs, graphs of a size slightly less than a certain threshold are very unlikely to have the property, whereas graphs with a few more graph edges are almost certain to have it. This is known as a phase transition (Janson et al. 2000, p. 103)."