>We get a more elegant situation if we suppose that consciousness is a necessary side effect of creatures like us. We are concious, so creatures like us must b

>We get a more elegant situation if we suppose that consciousness is a necessary side effect of creatures like us. We are concious, so creatures like us must be concious, otherwise they're not 'like' us. This is a conceptual pit trap. I'm sorry but I don't see this as at all elegant, it's the usual hierarchical inversion error somewhat disguised. A is a kind of B, therefore B is a kind of A. Phrased like that it's obviously false, but we see people doing this all the time. In this case the most common manifestation is conscious systems are complex systems (A is a kind of B where A=conciousness, B=complex), therefore complex systems are conscious (B is a kind of A). Therefore panpsychism. I suppose the argument is that consciousness might be a generalised attribute of complexity, or slightly more plausibly of information processing systems, but I see no evidence for this, and frankly no reason to believe it might be true. I am very wary of these kinds of hierarchical inversion though, they must be approached an examined extremely carefully because it's a very seductive intellectual failure mode.