4 ms·

For me, panpsychism has never landed at all, though it is a fun idea to think about. I tend to see animals/humans as exceedingly complex (and most likely determ

For me, panpsychism has never landed at all, though it is a fun idea to think about. I tend to see animals/humans as exceedingly complex (and most likely deterministic) systems, of which what we call "consciousness" is an emergent property. From that viewpoint, applying consciousness down the chain to the lower-level building blocks doesn't make a lot of sense.

dr_dshiv 5y ago
You don’t have to go down the chain, you can go up, too. E.g., groups, organizations, ecosystems, etc. It’s not that individual electrons need to be conscious. Instead, for instance, free energy minimizing systems might be conscious— and those are pervasive in the universe at large and small scale.
- scubakid 5y ago
  I feel like even that requires a pretty broad definition of consciousness that starts to diverge from what the term usually connotes. This strikes me as similar to the classic question of whether an ant hill could be considered conscious. In the end I guess a lot comes down to semantics/definitions.
  - dr_dshiv 5y ago
    Consciousness is qualia, feeing, experience. So, for instance, if the feeling of dissonance and harmony has some universal characteristic of the alignment of differences into a unified flow, then one can postulate that this characteristic may have a qualitative experience that is similarly universal in those systems where it occurs.
namlem 5y ago
If you break consciousness down to its most basic element, qualia, I think it's plausible that even very simple systems might be conscious. Not conscious in the way humans or animals are conscious though. Perhaps consciousness is just something that is inherent to information states. The simplest form of consciousness might exist in a switch with an on/off position. If consciousness is indeed innate to information states, then it feels like something to be on or off. There is nothing the switch can do with this information, it's incapable of doing anything. All it can be is on or off. The switch isn't sentient, it just has a subjective experience of on or off.

dr_dshiv 5y ago

You don’t have to go down the chain, you can go up, too. E.g., groups, organizations, ecosystems, etc. It’s not that individual electrons need to be conscious. Instead, for instance, free energy minimizing systems might be conscious— and those are pervasive in the universe at large and small scale.

scubakid 5y ago
I feel like even that requires a pretty broad definition of consciousness that starts to diverge from what the term usually connotes. This strikes me as similar to the classic question of whether an ant hill could be considered conscious. In the end I guess a lot comes down to semantics/definitions.
- dr_dshiv 5y ago
  Consciousness is qualia, feeing, experience. So, for instance, if the feeling of dissonance and harmony has some universal characteristic of the alignment of differences into a unified flow, then one can postulate that this characteristic may have a qualitative experience that is similarly universal in those systems where it occurs.

namlem 5y ago

If you break consciousness down to its most basic element, qualia, I think it's plausible that even very simple systems might be conscious. Not conscious in the way humans or animals are conscious though. Perhaps consciousness is just something that is inherent to information states. The simplest form of consciousness might exist in a switch with an on/off position. If consciousness is indeed innate to information states, then it feels like something to be on or off. There is nothing the switch can do with this information, it's incapable of doing anything. All it can be is on or off. The switch isn't sentient, it just has a subjective experience of on or off.