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What if everything is conscious?
- rolph 2y agowhat if we have grossly anthropomorphized consciousness, and it is really a simple, or fundamental [universal] process of informatic mis/matching rules.
- moralestapia 2y agoNot simple but universal, yes. It's also not pattern matching, though.
- rolph 2y agobetween now, and ,,, now* something has had an effect on the thing that decides
- moralestapia 2y agoAgree :).
- thegabriele 2y agoMaybe, but define consciousness first
- mapcars 2y agoYou can't properly do it, because basics of definitions is logic, and not everything in the universe has to fit into human-made logic. This is why western science falls short in topics of consciousness, spirituality, mysticism compared to eastern wisdom where people always talked about these things in dialectical, poetic ways.
- Animats 2y agoSimple answer: GPT-3 has 175 billion parameters. What happens if you run it with, say, 100 parameters? Size matters.
- owenpalmer 2y ago> Size matters. Citation needed
- argimenes 2y ago"In a nutshell, the problem is this: You’re conscious. But if you’re just made of non-conscious matter, why and how exactly could consciousness arise from that?" Another way of phrasing it which highlights the fallacy is: "In a nutshell, the problem is this: You’re alive. But if you’re just made of non-alive matter, why and how exactly could life arise from that?" Just because we don't know exactly how life arose from non-biotic matter doesn't mean that non-biotic matter is alive. And just because we don't know how consciousness arose, exactly, doesn't mean that all matter is conscious.
- llamaimperative 2y agoEh, not really. There are things all along the alive-dead spectrum. “Life” is readily explained as, essentially, chemical reactions. There’s nothing going on in a living thing that you can’t explain in terms of unliving things. The original emergence of life is rather mysterious/special, but the mechanics of how it now propagates out of “dead” matter is not. This is not true of consciousness. We cannot find any evidence of anything in particular that would “turn the lights on” in matter that didn’t previously have the lights turned on.
- mapcars 2y ago> There’s nothing going on in a living thing that you can’t explain in terms of unliving things. There are myriads of things you can't explain about life in any terms. Just that you did not go deep enough to experience them.
- llamaimperative 2y agoProvide examples. It’s chemical, electrical, and thermal reactions all the way down. The one exception is consciousness.
- mapcars 2y agoSamadhi, shoonya
- yzydserd 2y agoThe BBC podcast In Our Time did a recent hour long episode on panpsychism, which in this listener’s ears represented a thorough dismantling of the baloney. Fabulous episode, it had me roaring with laughter. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001vl96 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001vl96
- munk-a 2y agoEverything is conscious and nothing is conscious - we are all part of the universe but what we call conscious is, IMO, nothing more than a tool for trying to optimize food acquisition getting way out of control. Considering how many things are a portion of our body and simultaneously considered separate living organisms it's pretty bizarre to have such an explicitly defined view of consciousness in our existence that can let you point at a cat or human and say "That is a conscious being".
- FredPret 2y agoConsciousness: the ultimate yak shave
- jvm___ 2y agoWe're parasitic worms with an overdeveloped brain.
- TheOtherHobbes 2y agoSubjective consciousness is defined by the experience of qualia, one of which is a sense of a persistent and separate self-object. We know what that means to us but we can only assume others have similar experiences. And the only way to do that is by looking at behaviours. So we point at cats and humans and say they're conscious because they demonstrate behaviours that we associate with our subjective experience of consciousness - goal seeking and planning, apparent emotional responses, awareness of context, decision making, pattern- and repetition-based learning, and other kinds of responsiveness and agency. It's a very specific idea of what consciousness is, and it only really applies at human scale. If an object/entity/subsystem experienced qualia of any kind - including the experience of any kind of self-object, from the most rudimentary to the most universal - without demonstrating any of the behaviours at a human scale, we'd never know.
- ds_opseeker 2y ago> goal seeking and planning, apparent emotional responses, awareness of context, decision making, pattern- and repetition-based learning, some argue (using data and experimentation) that trees and/or other plants express all of these behaviors
- suby 2y agoI think it's likely that consciousness only occurs in a population which undergoes evolution / natural selection. I think it offers a competitive advantage over other let's say processes which you're competing for resources with. It's unlikely for something like the sun to be conscious, there's no evolutionary pressure exerted on it.
- llamaimperative 2y agoEvolutionary pressure itself doesn't generate new features, it merely selects them for propagation (in a self-propagating system). In biological organisms, the thing that generates new features are viruses (injections of genetic code into other genetic code) and the natural errors involved of replicating genetic code. That answers the question of how pretty much every biological feature is produced and propagated, except the question of how/when/where something goes from being unconscious to conscious.
- ASalazarMX 2y agoEvolutionary pressure has chosen fireflies that can not only track fast-moving prey, but actually predict their trajectory. Does prediction require some level of consciousness? How about for bigger animals? Consciousness is a spectrum. Even humans, the pinnacle of known consciousness, can go from conscious to unconscious and back fairly easy. What's the exact instant when the sky turns from red to blue in a sunrise?
- llamaimperative 2y agoI’m not debating any of this. The question is what happens between zygote formation and an adult human. Either the zygote “has consciousness” in it already, or consciousness appears at some point in development. So the question is: when?
- fuzzfactor 2y ago>What if everything is conscious? Then we're really screwed.
- ergonaught 2y agoIf everything is conscious then it occurs at such a fundamental level that it is literally meaningless. Irrelevant. The only value in this would be knowing that we can stop wasting time trying to understand how the brain may generate consciousness. Panpsychism is not a scientific view. We are far, far too early for it even if it’s true.
- llamaimperative 2y agoI strongly disagree. I would bet that people would, for example, want to treat trees differently if we knew they had an internal subjective experience. It actually specifically wouldn't do the thing you mention. Why on earth would you get less interested in the brain if other things are conscious too? There's clearly a lot that's unique about brains compared to other objects in the universe.
- RobertRies 2y agoI strongly agree with ergonaught, and disagree with what you're saying. This tiny interaction I think is the the entire problem with how panpsychists talk about this. Some panpsychists might try to actually say that there's a potential that trees and rocks have an internal subjective experience that is in some way comparable to human conscious experience (i.e. they feel some kind of "pain," that "hurts" them, and they "suffer". But I contend we have very little reason to believe that, and a lot of reason not to believe that. For example, with very, very little modification to my biology, I can eliminate this experience in myself (painkillers, anesthesia, other drugs, falling into a deep sleep, etc.) Once you even slightly disrupt the structure of our brains functioning, it all falls apart. We feel nothing. I think even most panpsychists would not take the above position, and would instead say "oh well, plant consciousness is entirely unrecognizable and might not even have reasonable continuity of consciousnesses. "Pain" wouldn't even make sense to a plant or a rock. We're just saying that the matter that constitutes plants and rocks have a very tiny (relative to humans) kind of "experience" but it's a huge mistake to anthropomorphize that, and you shouldn't feel like you're making grass "suffer" by cutting it. ^and if it's the second case, it's unprovable and uninteresting and "literally meaningless. Irrelevant."
- Murky3515 2y agoAlternative title: Vox editor takes an intro to Philosophy course
- paulddraper 2y ago"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." - Edsger Dijkstra
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- wkyleg 2y agoI thought this article was interesting https://www.sheldrake.org/files/pdfs/papers/Is_the_Sun_Conscious.pdf https://www.sheldrake.org/files/pdfs/papers/Is_the_Sun_Consc... If consciousness is just some form of self-reference and autopoiesis via cellular automaton, there's little reason to believe it couldn't extend to the extremes of the macro or micro scale.
- paulddraper 2y agoYou can see a somewhat similar concept explored the the Ender's Game series (IIRC from Xenocide on). "Philotes." It's an idea comes from Card's Mormon background.
- mjfl 2y agoconsciousness seems to require short term memory, an internal representation of the world where 'experience' is an update to that internal representation. This would seem to require a brain, or transistors!
- RobertRies 2y agoI very much agree with this. It seems to me panpsychists make a redefinition of consciousness as some entirely alien, unrecognizable thing. So, if an atom is conscious, but has no sensory systems, no possibly way to store memory etc. Well the atoms are still "experiencing" something, it's just instantaneously vanishing and there's no continuity and you can't even fathom what the experience of an atom is like per epoch because it's so different from our consciousness. I think this is a redefinition of consciousness and shifts the problem of explaining when an entity has an experience like we all think about experiences, which was the interesting part in the first place.
- xnx 2y agoProbably a continuum with a lot of other species we treat very poorly (either directly or through habitat destruction) not nearly as far away as we would like to think.
- IIAOPSW 2y agoThis seems like a very modern academic way of circling back to the way some old cultures believe(d) everything has a spirit. It says more about the way we perceive and conceptualize the world than it does about the world itself. Conscious entities tend to reason about conscious entities, and they can extend that reasoning ability to non-conscious things by modelling them as a conscious entities that happen to be very shy. I forget which Greek philosopher it was who described the forces of nature in terms of solids "loving" the ground and "hating" the sky and likewise the other forms of matter "loving" and "hating" various positions in space. Everything is conscious (in the minds of the things which are actually conscious).
- llamaimperative 2y agoYou have not understood the argument for panpsychism
- ASalazarMX 2y agoWhich is not a great loss in itself, as panpsychism is a useless theory that offers no insight into the working of consciousness, nor evidence or experiments to gather it. It's not much more than a philosophical fantasy tale.
- llamaimperative 2y agoPeople said the same thing about plate tectonics. The boundary of what is testable has always been moving and it’s honestly a little astounding that this isn’t obvious to everyone making this argument.
- ASalazarMX 2y agoPlate tectonics provided evidence and made predictions which can be tested. The pseudoscience of panpsychism can't provide evidence, nor experiments to prove or falsify it. Saying that everything is conscious is a huge claim, it can't be accepted just for the goodness of our hearts.
- Scarblac 2y agoUsing alcohol has an effect on how I consciously experience things. I've heard from others that other drugs influence conscience even more. To me that's very strong evidence it is something physical, tied to functions of our bodies, and not something shared by everything.
- RobertRies 2y agoI entirely agree with this, and I likewise think it's quite damning. But panpsychists don't see it this way. This is "the combination problem" and I predict they will never be able to solve this. Edit: I should elaborate on how it relates. Some would say that the alcohol or foreign substances are disrupting the combination of the consciousness of the matter, disrupting the overall consciously experience that makes up your matter. So, for example, now there's a bunch of little consciousnesses that aren't "combined".
- jerry1979 2y agoBut taking drugs also affects physiological things such as breathing, heart rate, salivation, sweat, etc. All of those things are tied to physical material that starts outside the body that our physical bodies manage thanks to evolutionary selection. We manage oxygen with breathing/heart rate, water for salivation and sweat, etc. The fact that the physical body and evolution also manage consciousness should probably be evidence that consciousness exists outside the body just like oxygen and water.
- mistermann 2y ago> To me that's very strong evidence it is something physical, tied to functions of our bodies, and not something shared by everything. The "is" physical (has a physical component, as opposed to equals or is purely) makes sense, but how does "not something shared by everything" logically follow?
- Scarblac 2y ago> but how does "not something shared by everything" logically follow? If someone else drinks alcohol, my consciousness doesn't change.
- lxe 2y agoYou are the only thing that's conscious. Or rather... I am the only thing that's conscious.
- jl6 2y agoI must admit, I tend to act in a way somewhat compatible with ethical panpsychism, insofar as I think it is wrong to be cruel to animals, but also varying degrees of wrong to damage plants gratuitously, and even to damage inanimate objects gratuitously, or to pollute a clean space, or to derange something well-ordered. That Apple ad where they smashed musical instruments was barbaric. However, I have been known to be mean to the odd atom now and then.
- meitham 2y agoVery well written article! The example of the slime learning is amazing
- lxe 2y agoNature's full of emergent properties that arise from components lacking those properties. Take snowflakes: complex patterns emerging from basic physical processes. Strawson argues these aren't analogous to consciousness. He claims other emergent properties can be explained by their constituents' physical properties and arrangements, but consciousness can't be reduced this way. Thing is, Strawson's giving consciousness special treatment. It's basically an argument from incredulity. Our current inability to explain consciousness doesn't make it impossible. This gap in our understanding doesn't justify jumping to radical solutions like panpsychism. Historically, science has explained countless "inexplicable" phenomena through emergent processes. Treating consciousness as a unique case requiring extraordinary explanations goes against the trend of scientific progress. TL;DR: Strawson's making consciousness a special case without sufficient justification. It's premature to assume we need radical solutions just because we can't explain it yet.
- disambiguation 2y agoConsciousness might be everywhere in the same way that magnetism is everywhere. You just need an electrical loop first.