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I personally believe in the theory of panpsychism but it raises so many crazy questions. What defines an object? If everything is just a sea of atoms where pr

I personally believe in the theory of panpsychism but it raises so many crazy questions. What defines an object? If everything is just a sea of atoms where precisely is that boundary that says "this is a rock, and it as a whole is conscious". If I take a chip off that rock, do we now have two distinct conscious entities? If I cold weld two huge pieces of steel together so they fuse at an atomic level, did I just turn two independent slabs of steel into one larger conscious entity? When does it become one entity? When the first atom between the two is fused together, or does it become "more" conscious as I continue to weld it together? The rabbit hole goes deep with the concept of consciousness.

beaconstudios 6y ago
you might be interested in emergentism and constructivism as I believe they provide useful concrete answers to your questions. Panpsychism falls into the slippery question of defining what "consciousness" is; emergentism provides the frameworks of cybernetics and systems theory to approach many philosophical issues, and can be applied in a panpsychism-ish way by using the concept of self-organisation and adaptation to the environment as the scale for "consciousness". constructivism says that our experience of reality is based in our perceptions and our labels for things are just useful mental models. An object is defined by how we use it - a chair is a thing you sit on, for example. The ship of theseus is whatever theseus uses to travel the river regardless of the planks it is made of. I've not yet run into any internal contradictions in this worldview, which is the stick by which I measure sensemaking model efficacy.
perl4ever 6y ago
I don't think the question you are asking is specific to consciousness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox

beaconstudios 6y ago

you might be interested in emergentism and constructivism as I believe they provide useful concrete answers to your questions. Panpsychism falls into the slippery question of defining what "consciousness" is; emergentism provides the frameworks of cybernetics and systems theory to approach many philosophical issues, and can be applied in a panpsychism-ish way by using the concept of self-organisation and adaptation to the environment as the scale for "consciousness". constructivism says that our experience of reality is based in our perceptions and our labels for things are just useful mental models. An object is defined by how we use it - a chair is a thing you sit on, for example. The ship of theseus is whatever theseus uses to travel the river regardless of the planks it is made of. I've not yet run into any internal contradictions in this worldview, which is the stick by which I measure sensemaking model efficacy.

perl4ever 6y ago

I don't think the question you are asking is specific to consciousness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox