16 ms·
A philosophical theory where hard determinism and panpsychism are compatible
- adrianN 3y agoUntil we have a definition of consciousness that allows us to determine whether something is conscious or not I don’t really see the point of debating the compatibility of determinism and consciousness (whatever that word is supposed to mean).
- tgv 3y agoNot just our own consciousness, but the consciousness of everything in the universe. If such a crackpot idea is compatible with hard determinism, then that’s a blow for the latter.
- coldtea 3y ago>If such a crackpot idea is compatible with hard determinism, then that’s a blow for the latter. Is it really? I don't think compatibility with a crackpot idea/thing brings a blow to an orthogonal idea. For example, I could believe that Mars is an alien base. This is crackpot, but it doesn't give any blow to countless other ideas it's compatible with, e.g. economic or social theories, gravity, explanations of historical eras, etc.
- ethanbond 3y agoPanpsychism is a crackpot explanation of consciousness that just happens to be less ridiculous than every other explanation
- simiones 3y agoWhy would computational explanations of consciousness be more ridiculous than the non-explanation that is asserting everything is conscious in some way (which is basically what panpsychism means)?
- ethanbond 3y agoAt what degree of computation does consciousness emerge? There must be some level of computation at which there’s zero consciousness and then one rung above that there’s a non-zero degree of consciousness. Where could that line possibly be? I personally cannot reasonably even guess at such a boundary, so panpsychism is a much cleaner explanation. These two ideas aren’t really mutually exclusive anyway. I.e. you can believe that consciousness is what it feels like to compute, but then “what is compute” except a particularly structured form of a thing that’s happening everywhere and all the time (particles and energy bouncing around) in more or less structured forms. And if you say “well not all energy/particle interactions are computation, even of an abysmally low degree,” then return to the first question: what types of interactions or what degrees of structure are non-computational where one rung above it they are computational?
- simiones 3y agoThe computational explanation would hold that there is some specific computation that can be identified as what we call consciousness. This would be equivalent to how we say that a specific computation is what we call "sorting". It's not a gradualist notion. A computation either is or isn't consciousness. If it is, then an agent which is currently performing that computation is conscious. If an agent is performing a computation that is not consciousness is not conscious. Similarly, certain computations represent a sort. Agents which are performing that computation are sorting. The clearest case is a computer running a sort algorithm, but there are also purely physical processes that perform the same computations, and animals or people that do it - so "agent" here is a very broad term. Agents which are performing a computation that is not a sort are not sorting. Of course, determining which computation is actually consciousness is a very difficult problem, well beyond our current knowledge. As such, it is also obvious that it may turn out that this is not a correct model. But I don't see why this would be considered a ridiculous model of what consciousness means. It is also a model which can, in principle, be falsified, and it could actually help resolve certain difficult real-world problems. For example, if we did have a satisfying definition of which computations represent consciousness, we could then use it to determine at which point a child becomes conscious, or whether a particular animal is conscious or not (assuming we consider that conscious === should not be killed arbitrarily, which is a completely different debate). By contrast, panpsychism doesn't really resolve anything and can't be used to determine the answer to this type of moral question even in principle (if any system is somewhat conscious, then even swiveling my chair means that I am destroying a conscious system; but also creating another one).
- mellosouls 3y agocrackpot idea A respectable philosophical idea with thousands of years behind it, and new impetus the past couple of decades. Always best to have at least a basic understanding of a subject before using such dismissive terms. You can read about it here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/
- tgv 3y agoI'd recommend going back to spontaneous generation first. A very respectable, old idea. Or perhaps the existence of a soul? That's even older, and is still heavily defended until this day. If lineage is so important, belief in a soul trumps pan-psychism.
- james-bcn 3y ago> Until we have a definition of consciousness that allows us to determine whether something is conscious or not but that is essentially The Hard Problem.
- telmo 3y agoConsciousness is the thing and the only thing that you have direct experience of. Everything else could be an illusion. You could be a brain in a jar and all of the reality you perceive be a simulation, but you would still be conscious. I know that I am conscious and I cannot doubt it, but at the same time I cannot prove it to you. Furthermore, I strongly suspect and assume that other human beings are conscious, but I cannot verify this scientifically (i.e. measure it somehow). This means that consciousness is a phenomenon that cannot be doubted (in the first person) but possibly eludes the scientific method. This really grates people who have a strong emotional attachment to the dogma that science must be able to account for all of reality. People confuse the metaphysical commitment of materialism with scientific fact, and thus conclude that consciousness must be an emergent phenomenon of neural complexity, and that it is silly to believe that anything else could be conscious. This feels like an hyper-rational, scientific stance, but really it is not. Science works perfectly fine within other metaphysical commitments such as idealism, panpsychism, etc. This is not to say that materialism is not correct, I do not know if it is or not. My point is that many contemporary "scientific types" tend to believe that their certainty about materialism being the correct framework is grounded on science, when it is not. It is often an unexamined and quasi-religious belief.
- ffwd 3y agoI understand the argument but I disagree and would phrase it the other way around. We don't have evidence of conscious experience because we don't have evidence for a division between conscious experience and "existence/physical stuff" in the first place. This division is created by our brains and the model we have of the world but in reality the only evidence we have is that something exists. Therefore, what we call subjective experience is evidence for the existence of what we experience, but until we can empirically show that there is a difference between what we experience and what reality is, the only thing we can say is that it exists. Also, that's the problem with the hard problem of consciousness - it assumes a division between the two, and we have no evidence of such a division. And lastly if it's not clear i am not a panpsychist either because that assumes a division on some level again. We don't know what existence itself is and how it functions really, at least not the brains function within existence.
- A_D_E_P_T 3y agoI have given this some thought. I believe that: If something has (a) a robust temporal-spatial sense, a "reference frame" in time and space, (b) physical boundedness, (c) a robust and general predictive function which is capable of abstraction, (d) independent volition, and (e) behavior that is non-deterministic in the weak sense that its actions cannot easily be foreseen by any arbitrarily powerful computer within the universe that it resides in, then: That thing is conscious. It's possible to imagine entities that don't necessarily satisfy all conditions and are nevertheless somehow conscious -- i.e., a sufficiently powerful AI that has no clear physical bounds and a poor (but not entirely absent) spatial reference frame, but which possesses independent volition and can independently simulate concepts -- but if all conditions are clearly met, then an entity is unambiguously conscious.
- SanderNL 3y agoThis is not novel in any way, but its style and the way you can ask questions can definitely help shape your ideas and steer you towards topics to research further. If you are not overly familiar with these concepts I can see this being helpful and interesting. Personally I tried to tease novel techniques for compression out of it. It got me curious and at least it forced me to learn more about the domain to explain why its ideas were wrong. Maybe that's a thing: it's so confidently (sometimes subtly) incorrect that it may take effort to learn how it's wrong. This itself can be an interesting exercise that wasn't really possible before.
- danbruc 3y agoAre those ideas not essentially orthogonal and therefore never were in conflict? Determinism is about what can or will happen given the current state of the universe, panpsychism is trying to explain where your experience of the current state comes from. There might be some conflict, for example if you conclude from your experience of having free will that you actually have free will, but those do not seem central enough to necessitate conflict. 1. Moral Responsibility: The concept of moral responsibility would need to be re-evaluated. [...] You are not going to reevaluate anything in a deterministic universe.
- AndrewDucker 3y agoI might well re-evaluate things in a deterministic universe. I just won't have any choice over whether I do.
- bondarchuk 3y ago"I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined and that we can do nothing to change it look before they cross the road." (Stephen Hawking) People get so hopelessly confused about determinism and minds...
- danbruc 3y agoBecause he makes an easy mistake in the quote? I would say the real confusion will start showing up once you try making sense of the words »noticed« and »claim« in that sentence.
- efitz 3y agoI think that determinism is not a useful theory, and I think that is what Hawking was getting at in his wry comment. Even if the universe is deterministic, it doesn’t feel deterministic, and determinism doesn’t help me with ethics or morality. It reminds me of The Stranger.
- 3y ago
- Borrible 3y agoTalking to a mirror, pondering the Gestalt you're giving the image.
- Jevon23 3y agoThere’s no reason to think that they’re incompatible in the first place. May as well ask it to synthesize a theory in which Linux and relational databases are compatible.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bluetomcat 3y agoDeterminism is a dead end that renders the human mind useless. It has its roots in the mechanistic cause-effect nature of Newtonian physics. Rationalist philosophers like Rene Descartes and Baruch Spinoza create rigid, math-like world-views believing in this. Later, David Hume would prove them wrong by demonstrating that causality is not a simple problem at all.
- robertlagrant 3y agoI don't even understand how flipping a coin to make a decision isn't the death of hard determinism. Or is it that random events can be inputs to determinism?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- chongli 3y agoHow is flipping a coin incompatible with a deterministic universe? Seems to me that it only seems random because our muscle control isn’t good enough to flip the side we want every time.
- simiones 3y agoFirst of all, in a Newtonian model, flipping a coin is not a random event, the result of the coin flip is determined by the exact forces applied, which are determined by the muscle movements of the flipper, which are determined by chemical reactions in their brain etc. Secondly, even true randomness doesn't significantly alter the world-view of Determinism, at least not when applied to the problem of consciousness (as in the current context). Regardless of whether the future state of the world is fully determined by the past state, or whether the future state of the world is fully determined by the past state + random events, consciousness and conscious decisions play no role. That is, the feeling that you decide whether to go to work or not, that today you could have decided otherwise if you had wanted to, is still an illusion in either model. In pure determinism, this was determined the moment the universe came into being. In determinism+true randomness, whether you went or not was unknowable ahead of time, but you still didn't have any input: say, some cosmic ray flipping a switch in your brain or not determined whether you did go.
- throwawy132123 3y ago[flagged]
- empedocles 3y agoI think that pansychism and determinism are interesting theories, but it is not clear to me what I will learn about them by reading ChatGPT potentially hallucinate about them?
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y agoArguing about determinism is boring and pointless. If determinism is true, then logic and reason has no bearing on anybody’s conclusion. It is only if determinism is false that logic and reason are in any way meaningful, and thus anything is worth arguing about. Another way: If determinism is true, then there is no point in arguing about it. So: If it is worth arguing about, then according to the laws of logic, it is false. If it is not with arguing about, then why are you arguing about it.
- nprateem 3y agoHow do you work out whether it's worth arguing about or not?
- drupe 3y agoEven if hard determinism is true then the act of 'communicating a logical argument' is still part of the deterministic chain of events and could potentially influence the beliefs and actions of others.
- simiones 3y ago> If determinism is true, then logic and reason has no bearing on anybody’s conclusion. That is obviously false. In a deterministic model, your beliefs are determined by all of the inputs you ever received. It is in fact stronger than a model of the world that includes strong free will: there, an agent can hear a perfectly valid argument that explains in all ways that the agent understands this that 1+1=2, but the agent can decide not to believe it for no reason whatsoever (since its decision would be independent from anything that they had ever heard or experienced or thought about before). It is in fact pure free will that would make any kind of logic or reasoning useless, since, again, your decisions would not be in any way determined by your life up to the point of the decision.
- chaps 3y agoHeh, was once able to get chatgpt to give an articulate explanation about how the single electron model of the universe would explain both 1. consciousness and 2. why elephant breasts look like human breasts. It's such a good bullshitter.
- federalbob 3y agoThis is what it looks like: https://chat.openai.com/share/593ddf63-cc10-4bd3-8e4a-af065396b6e4 https://chat.openai.com/share/593ddf63-cc10-4bd3-8e4a-af0653... Seems pretty reasonable to me
- chaps 3y ago"emergence" is a copout though. The answer was more along the lines of describing the electron as the primary interface between the instantaneous "now" and the future, and the breast being the interface between generations.
- brendev 3y agoAn interesting read for sure, thanks for posting! I did notice that it referred Spinoza as if his views were in opposition to Panpsychism. Spinoza actually proposed that God(consciousness) exists within all things, and that studying physics and the nature of the universe is to study the psychology of God. Like he's literally mentioned on the SEP page for Panpsychism [1] I see where chatGPT would get confused. Spinoza is identified as a Rationalist, which is generally more aligned towards determinist thought. Looking at it, I wonder if perhaps Spinoza's views are already in alignment with both Deterministic and Panpsychist thoughts (which, as others have mentioned, are not inherently mutually exclusive anyway). [1]https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/
- qwerty456127 3y agoWhat's written there seems not just correct but pretty obvious to me. I never insist I'm correct though, in this kind of matters expecially as there hardly is a way to check what can be only concluded from speculation and feeling.
- vjerancrnjak 3y agoIf this is true, then universe is local and real and all of our observations are correlated with previous events and we will never be able to find out the truth of it through observation. Although, if everything is unified/interconnected under the same consciousness and this manifests as non-local effects in the universe, then there's room for the universe not being deterministic. Similarly, maybe determinism is a wrong way of looking at it. Maybe there is no true relationship between one moment and the next, and it is only your observation that sees the ordering of events. Maybe all of the events exist everywhere all at once and their ordering, progress, unfolding is just a flaw of the observation. How would an object like a photon perceive the universe and can it perceive given that photon never meets time?
- fmeyer 3y agoI bet you are reading Deutch’s The begging of Infinity.
- dwroberts 3y agoI thought I was clicking a link to a blog post or discussion by OpenAI the company, and not just a random chat with GPT
- dash2 3y agoThis sounds clever but is content-free. The "new theory" that chatGPT synthesizes simply restates its assumptions. Here's what it calls the "fundamental principles" of hard determinism and panpsychism: * Hard Determinism: This is the belief that every event in the universe is determined by antecedent causes and conditions. There is no genuine free will; everything that occurs is the inevitable result of prior circumstances. * Panpsychism: The idea that consciousness, or at least some basic form of it, is pervasive throughout the universe. Every entity, no matter how small, has some element of consciousness or experiential quality. And here's the first two "foundational principles" of its new theory: * Universality of Experience: The fabric of the universe is interwoven with rudimentary consciousness or experiential quality. This means everything from subatomic particles to galaxies possesses some level of conscious experience. In this view, consciousness isn't just a by-product of complex systems like the human brain but is instead a fundamental property of reality. * Chain of Determined Consciousness: Every event, interaction, or change that takes place in the universe is pre-determined by prior conditions. Each of these events involves conscious entities (be it elementary particles, cells, animals, or galaxies) experiencing the unfolding of the deterministic chain. Each particle, while following a pre-determined path, experiences its journey in its own unique way. But these are just the first two points in different language! The only new thing is that chatGPT says the particles are conscious while they pursue their predetermined path. This is like saying "my new theory of light explains how it can be both a wave and a particle. Principle 1: light is composed of waves. Principle 2: light is simultaneously composed of particles! Where's my Nobel?"
- codeulike 3y agoIt doesn't really matter whether the universe is determinstic or not, because even if it were, it would be impossible to build anything to exploit that determinism on any useful scale, and so the future remains unknowable. You can think of the universe as a giant computer calculating its own future one picosecond at a time. There is no way to 'jump ahead' and find out the future. Hence it doesn't matter whether it's determinstic or not. And probably never be possible to tell anyway. And anyway if it's not determinstic, what is it instead, Random? How is that any better or any different? How does free will approximate in this metaphysics? Imagine your skull as a boundary between whats inside it and whats outside it - what you do next is mostly to do with whats happening inside your skull rather than outside it. Apart from certain scenarios like freefall, skydiving or something. And yes the workings of your brain have been determined by things outside your skull over time - your experiences and memories and genetic inheritance and so on. But the proximate cause of what you do next is mostly whats inside your skull. So lets just call that agency or free will and be done with it.