
Electrons don’t think - mathgenius
https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/01/electrons-dont-think.html?spref=tw
======
SmirthsDAC
>Now, if you want a particle to be conscious, your minimum expectation should
be that the particle can change.

The crux of the argument seems to be here, and is simply a fallacious
equivalency of free will/agency and consciousness. Two different philosophical
issues that may have a unifying explanation, but not for now.

Besides, panpsychism seems to almost be tautological in its assertions: if we
accept materialism, and we accept consciousness exists in some creatures, then
where else would consciousness be "realized" in aggregate except distributed
amongst the actual matter of the brain, down reductivly to sub-atomic
particles? That doesn't mean it's a fully formalized robust theory, but the
concepts underlying it are sound.

~~~
Analemma_
No, that’s crazy. It takes lots of atoms of iron and silicon to make a Boeing
747, but that doesn’t mean that a single iron atom has even the slightest
amount of “plane-ness”.

~~~
evdev
Demanding "plane-ness" is the mistake here: you're throwing in a kind of glib
idealism. If instead you demand "the possibility of forming lots and lots of
electron bonds in a shape capable of performing flight" then the iron atoms
did "have an amount" of the property necessary for being a plane.

~~~
Analemma_
I suppose if you define "conscious" in that way-- "this atom/electron/whatever
has the _possibility_ to be part of a system that
thinks/reasons/feels/perceives"\-- then yeah, panpsychism is vacuously true.
But that's a wild abuse of the word "conscious" that is nothing like the its
understood meaning: if nothing is not conscious, then the word is meaningless.
When we try to define consciousness, we're obviously looking for the "thing"
which we have but rocks and water molecules plainly don't. If you don't want
"consciousnesses" to be the word for that thing, fine, but serious people are
just going to ignore you, invent a new word for the thing, and carry on the
original search.

And when I talk to panpsychists, I get the distinct sense that they know this
and they're learning on it, and by doing so they're motte-and-baileying
everyone else. They start out by saying that "electrons have consciousness",
with the unspoken implication that consciousness means the popularly-
understood ability to reason and plan and have subjective experience, even if
they won't say so. And then when someone scientifically-minded comes along and
points out that that's absurd, they retreat to a new definition of
consciousness that is true but pointless. We're trying to really solve the
hard problem here, not handwave it away and declare victory.

~~~
Svettie
Maybe I'm not a serious person, but I don't think "consciousness means the
popularly-understood ability to reason and plan" is part of the common
understanding of this term, and a lot of what you wrote seems like a "no true
Scottsman" to me. And actually, really defining well what is meant by
"consciousness" seems to be a big part of the challenge.

> We're trying to really solve the hard problem here

This seems to me to be the crux of the misunderstanding. To me, panpsychism
essentially presents a perspective that it may not be a well-defined problem
in the first place. Like a dog chasing its own tail. Or if you prefer, it's
like the question: "why is there something rather than nothing?" who knows if
there is an answer to this? I don't want to go into this too much, but to me
panpsychism is basically an _intuition_ for why the "problem of consciousness"
may belong to this set of fundamental questions that we may not be able to
find an answer for, and if that could conceivably be the case, then it is
valuable for providing that intuition because that may be the best we can do.

------
kmm
What an unnecessarily divisive post. Science is not antithetical to
philosophy, and physicists and philosophers aren't two different camps. As
someone with an education in physics, I had a physics professor who also wrote
lovely articles in the subject of philosophy of science.

I don't doubt philosophers without education in the fundamentals of physics
can and often do come to conclusions that are naive and hopelessly
incompatible with physical evidence or models that have stood the test of time
for centuries. Especially quantum mechanics is a widely misunderstood and
misapplied subject. But it goes both ways, it is quite arrogant to think you
can disprove an entire subject in a field of study that isn't your own with
such simple reasoning.

It is true that electrons don't have a lot of internal state and can be
completely described with a few quantum numbers. But my first reaction
wouldn't be to conclude that panpsychism is obvious nonsense (not that I'm a
fan either, I'm have no problem confessing my ignorance on the subject), but
to see if someone more qualified in the topic had written something about it.

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rthomas6
This definition of consciousness, that there is some internal state that can
change based on input, and changing this internal state leads to different
behavior, is problematic. So is a definition that defines consciousness as
responding to identical stimuli in different ways.

The whole problem is that consciousness as a concept is poorly defined. I do
not think the people the believe inanimate objects have "consciousness"
believe consciousness necessitates thought, or even internal state.

------
FakeComments
This post seems to try and refute really technical philosophy with simplified
to the point of being wrong science.

It just seems awkward as a result.

But thinking really simplified science is enough to completely dismiss other
serious thinkers is why scientists get called closed minded: to use their
parlance, this rant isn’t even wrong.

~~~
SiempreViernes
Eh, probably Hossenfelder found some popular account of panpsychism that did
in fact argue that electrons have some sort of independent consciousness,
maybe even written by a philosopher. In fact, I spot just the argument she
refuted being stated as a reply elsewhere in these comments, preceded by the
words "She misses the point".

In any event, what exactly is simplified to the point of being wrong? That
more internal states effects cross sections?

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kazinator
Look, I'm not asking electrons to think outright; but reading a bit of the
schematic would be nice.

~~~
noonespecial
I don't know about you, but all of my electrons diabolically thwart my every
effort to contain or direct them, especially at higher frequencies. Petulant
little bastards those electrons...

------
User23
This is a well written and educational article, but it’s also missing the
point. For a dualist, no amount of material testing is going to determine a
spiritual/ideal/pickyourlabel characteristic.

Even if you hold the dualist position there’s nothing here to disagree with.

Sadly she didn’t address a question that’s interested me since reading
Feynman’s QED: how do electrons “decide” how to scatter?

Edit: I’m going to bookmark this to use as a virtually perfect example of not
even wrong.

------
nabla9
Author confuses thinking, and ability to act with consciousness the hard
problem. If you want to debate with philosophers, you must be ready to dig
deep into definitions.

When physicists use dabble with philosophy, run.

Even philosophers (like Dave Chalmers) can't explain their thinking in detail
in podcasts or popular articles. They just put some ideas there but it does
not represent the analytical thinking well.

------
hprotagonist
of course electrons don't think! they are merely the chaff and dross thrown
off by the _real_ movers and thinkers in the universe, which are monads[0].

 _" Just when one is about to judge Liebniz as having the strangest mind of
anyone who ever lived, one remembers Newton and his lifelong obsession with
alchemy and his strenuous efforts to predict the exact date of the End of the
World by ransacking the Book of Revelations for encrypted clues"_[1]

[0]:
[https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz/)

[1]: [http://faculty.cord.edu/andersod/Stephenson-
Metaphysics.pdf](http://faculty.cord.edu/andersod/Stephenson-Metaphysics.pdf)

------
jf-
The author misses the point. Panpsychism is in part a response to the hard
problem of consciousness, the question of how subjective experience arises
from non-experiencing matter. If consciousness at some basic, low level is
instead a property of matter, the issue stops being a difference of kind and
starts being one of degree: consciousness is an organisation of a property
that already exists in the components, so it need not _arise_ at all.

Consciousness and thought are also separate things. The seeing of the colour
red or touching a rough surface are experiences, though neither could be
described as thoughts.

~~~
rebuilder
_does_ subjective experience arise from matter? By which I mean, does it
exist?

I realize that seems like a completely bananas question to ask. But any theory
of consciousness seems to get into absurd territory very quickly. The only
proof we have that consciousness even exists is that each of us (or me,
anyway, who knows what you guys are) vehemently professes to experience it.
Other than that, all we seem to find is complex web of deterministic
reactions.

So what if the question is wrong? When we parse "I think therefore I am", we
look at "am" as the insight, but it seems to me the "I" is left undefined.

edit: I'm sorry, I jumped the gun on this a bit, you were saying it doesn't
arise. But nevertheless, I'm left uncomfortable declaring something exists
that we can not actually perceive from the outside.

------
jstanley
If elementary particles can't think, how can thinking arise when combinations
of elementary particles are put together?

It's all well and good saying that consciousness is incompatible with
evidence, but I for one perceive a great deal of consciousness. How do
"scientists" address this conflict with perception? Simple: they don't.

(FWIW, I don't think elementary particles can think).

~~~
empath75
> If elementary particles can't think, how can thinking arise when
> combinations of elementary particles are put together?

Where's the hurricane in a drop of water?

------
sneakernets
Wow, i just read all that.

I've never seen trolling on such a high level before.

~~~
SiempreViernes
I suspect this is simply how many germans argue in english, with the cultural
differences in expression lining up in such a way that their calm argument
comes out rather angry in english.

------
crazygringo
This is possibly the biggest straw-man I've ever seen set up to represent
panpsychism, and I feel like I've seen a lot.

This article is beyond nonsense. The author seems to define panpsychism as the
idea that a "conscious" particle would somehow affect the number of particles
produced in a collision. Where she gets that definition from, I can't even
begin to fathom.

Panpsychism isn't "crazy shit" we "tried long ago" and we haven't "moved on".
There's currently zero solid scientific evidence for _any_ theory of
consciousness, and the idea of panpsychism -- that consciousness is grounded
in the physical universe rather than being an emergent property or being
something supernatural -- is just as valid as any other right now. Who knows,
maybe it's something like gravity that's indetectable at the atomic scale but
shows up under very particular configurations at larger scales.

I don't know who this author is, but based on this post she comes across as
_anything_ but scientific.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
I think she's perfectly scientific.

She's also clueless about philosophy and metaphysics - which is unfortunately
not that unusual among contemporary scientists.

And I don't mean philosophy in the sense of being able to debate the fine
points of anything much - but in the sense of having the breadth of conceptual
education to understand what's required of genuinely a rational and consistent
argument, and what's actually an irrational and irrelevant appeal to
authority, as this "argument" is.

This isn't particularly about panpsychism or consciousness. It's that the
quality of the argument being presented is so poor.

She's drawing an identity between a taxonomy of observed behaviour and
independent consciousness, and saying that any entities that can be fitted
into a taxonomy can be conscious.

Which is "not even wrong."

You could just as well argue that electrons _are_ conscious because they can
read our minds while we do experiments and are trolling us by creating some
made-up rules they've invented which happen to look like quantum theory.

Both make as much sense, and both are equally unhelpful as rational arguments.

~~~
skh
_You could just as well argue that electrons are conscious because they can
read our minds while we do experiments and are trolling us by creating some
made-up rules they 've invented which happen to look like quantum theory._

One can argue similarly to give a possible explanation for anything. It's not
a question of whether it could be this way but rather what seems to be the
most plausible explanation. The argument you gave above (I know it's not one
you are seriously purporting) seems much less likely to be correct than the
one Sabine gave.

My reading of Sabine's argument is that we get the random behavior from
particle collisions you expect if quantum mechanics is correct and thus
electrons aren't conscious. The particles follow randomness and not what one
would think would occur if there was consciousness/free will involved. Yes,
she seems to make the connection between the two concepts.

I don't know if Sabine is correct but I certainly don't think

 _Both make as much sense, and both are equally unhelpful as rational
arguments._

------
21
r/IAmVerySmart

[https://xkcd.com/793/](https://xkcd.com/793/)

~~~
skh
She's a physicist and is addressing the notion that electrons have
consciousness. She works in quantum gravity and presumably knows quite a bit
about particle theory. Her blog post is solely about the idea that electrons
can have consciousness and why she - an expert in physics and quantum gravity
- believes this isn't possible. Since, according to her conclusions, electrons
can't have consciousness then the idea that all matter has consciousness can't
be correct. The logic is quite sound. I don't know if her definition of
panpsychism is correct but her logic is sound.

1\. Electrons are matter.

2\. Electrons don't have consciousness. (according to her argument)

3\. Therefore the belief that all matter has consciousness is wrong.

Note that an argument can be logically sound while having a false conclusion.
This happens if one of the premises are wrong. In this case it would be her
conclusion that electrons can't have consciousness.

------
lolc
Look we've been shooting these particles you call "humans" at varying targets
and so far they've all acted the same way. They haven't shown any difference
in how they reacted with different stars, for example. Even if we shoot them
back at that cold planet where you collected them, they all interact with it
the same way.

Consciousness at such small scale is simply not possible. Our theories don't
allow it.

------
nyc111
Consciousness is nothing mysterious. It is the state of the human body to be
aware of itself. It's independent of any organs. It has nothing to do with the
heart as previously thought or with the brain as is popular now. But it can be
associated with the microbiome because consciousness or self-awareness always
reacts to the microbiome. The microbiome serves to consciousness the content
it creates in order to lead the consciousness. The self perceives this content
as the "inner voice". A cat is not aware of itself as a cat because it
experiences its environment directly and not through the filter of language as
humans do. During sleep conscioussness "dies" and microbes take over and do
their business of repairing the body without the meddling of the
consciousness. When they become hungry and they want to be fed they wake up
their slave (the consciousness) and serve him beautiful images of crossants
and the smell of coffee in order to get their feed which is usually sugar.
This is not a physics problem and physicists should take their atomic
materialist doctrines with them and get out and continue discussing the
temperatures 14 billions years ago in ever greater details. Physicists can
have nothing to say about the human body.

