"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.
Eh, 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.
We are just monkeys trying to explain the universe and failing miserably because we're not smart enough to understand it at the basic level. Having failed repeatedly, some monkeys declare it mysterious and unknowable because they are too proud to embrace our limitations.
That we are not able to understand how, doesn't prove that life and consciousness arise from anything besides physics. Magic doesn't exist.
I'm not foreign to the irony of a dumb monkey declaring something doesn't exist, but I think it's been overwhelmingly clear through the ages that magic never has had any direct effect outside our imaginations.
Oh, I re-read your original comment and you're right. You said the origin of life is mysterious/special, and that we can't find how consciousness starts, but never attributed that mystery/specialness/lack of evidence to magic.
I think the wording made me assume you thought those processes had supernatural aid instead of the the incessant trial-and-error of the universe. That's a common argument when discussing the origin of life and consciousness.
I agree with the spirit of your comment, but I also think it's a little bit premature to say that life is readily explained as chemical reactions. For instance, ecologists study natural selection (i.e. the dynamics of life as we know it) at a much higher level than that, and for good reason! We really don't know how to reduce high-level aspects of behaviour down to matter and interaction yet - not even close.
Biology is the ultimate spaghetti code - there are causal loops between all the layers of abstraction (I guess as a result of enormous optimisation pressure and lots of time). I think that makes full-scale reductionism like you're describing a bit hopeless.
I didn't mean to suggest we understand every interaction from molecular to organism scales, but there's no reason to think that that stack of unfathomably complex and highly chaotic interactions is anything but chemical/electrical/thermal interactions.
I know that's not what you meant, but consider that there may be no feasible way to map those interactions onto a theory of chemical/electrical/thermal interactions even in principle. Scientifically speaking, in this case it's meaningless to say that those interactions "are nothing but chemical/electrical/thermal interactions", because you have no predictive power at that level whatsoever! This can true even though the constituents of any organism must obey the laws of physics at a microscopic scale.
edit: Anyway, we probably don't disagree about much here, I just think that this appeal to reductionism is a common fallacy.
It's not really true that we have "no" predictive power. Everywhere we've ever looked in any system anywhere in the universe, we've found nothing except the reactions that I've described. Even in biological systems.
We use this knowledge every day to predict and produce new drugs (though again, we are not very good at it).
We have found plenty besides those fundamental reactions - sticking to the theme of evolution, take the concept of the gene in natural selection. In that context, genes and their interactions have enormous predictive power. Fundamental interactions between particles do not.
Genes may be made up of such particles but they are their own concept, with their own interactions, which cannot be reduced to that of their constituents. You could argue that in theory you can measure the state of each particle in all of an organism's genes and simulate them according to the laws of particle physics, but that's not actually possible even in principle, for the simple reason that measuring a system to that degree would destroy it (the uncertainty principle).
There are lots of these "causal blankets" in the world, and I think they're a real challenge to the idea that everything is reducible to particle physics.
Yes I’ve done psychedelics, though I don’t really trace my (reluctant) belief in panpsychism to that.
Psychedelics are really great at showing you just how much “work” consciousness is doing, and just how fungible all of its contents are. And the most important insight, which is that everything “out there” in the world — everything you experience — is actually an internal, subjective representation.
The way I’ve described it is that we’re all in our own sensoriums, but that is generally totally opaque to us. Psychedelics can temporarily knock that sensorium askew — enough to notice that it’s there all the time and doesn’t have to be configured the way that it happens to be.
The reason I have reluctantly come to believe in panpsychism is because I haven’t heard anything close to a better explanation of when, where, and why “the lights are on.” There’s no reason to think there’s something special about brain matter in particular. There’s probably something special about information processing, but then: what is information processing? Information is just a local reduction in entropy, and all sorts of things are doing that in all sorts of ways all over the universe.
> Psychedelics are really great at showing you just how much “work” consciousness is doing, and just how fungible all of its contents are. And the most important insight, which is that everything “out there” in the world — everything you experience — is actually an internal, subjective representation.
> The way I’ve described it is that we’re all in our own sensoriums, but that is generally totally opaque to us. Psychedelics can temporarily knock that sensorium askew — enough to notice that it’s there all the time and doesn’t have to be configured the way that it happens to be.
Considering this: do you find it a bit strange that ~all people (including yourself above) write as if the opposite of this is true? I mean sure, "people are imperfect" and "everyone is just expressing their opinion" are attractive memes (cultural "truths" that emerge from the very same simulation), but is there not perhaps something important going on that might be worth paying at least a little attention to?
> there's no reason to think that that stack of unfathomably complex and highly chaotic interactions is anything but chemical/electrical/thermal interactions.
Did the psychedelics not teach you that knowledge of all like this may not be genuine? And never even mind that, is there good reason to trust what consciousness tells us in the first place? Sure, people have matching stories so that's a good sign, except the stories don't match over time.
Well what do you mean by "genuine?" Any scientific theorist would tell you that there's not really a claim as to the actual factuality of a scientific claim, only that it's the best known explanation. "Best known explanation" is inherently socially constructed, as it requires consensus. So these beliefs are genuine insofar as any belief whatsoever can be genuine.
I super, super highly recommend reading William James' work on this topic. I unfortunately can't remember which essay went into it in detail...
Replace "genuine" with true or accurate...accurate enough that nothing important is left out.
My intuition is that you are motivated to not understand. I have no particular problem with this, provided you acknowledge it explicitly. Watch this:
I am being "pedantic"[1]. This is an explicit acknowledgement of it. I am seeking ever more accurate descriptions of what is going on.
I will be even more brutal:
> there's no reason to think that that stack of unfathomably complex and highly chaotic interactions is anything but chemical/electrical/thermal interactions.
"Reasons" exist in the minds of all people. It seems to you (it is your experience) that you possess knowledge of the contents of all minds, but you do not actually. It seems like you know what any scientific theorist would tell you, but you do not really. You query your mind on the subject, it gives you an answer. If you are not omniscient (I believe you are not), and an accurate study has not been done (at most, a half-assed survey has been done, of a small portion of the whole), then the result must be(!) simulated, at least by my thinking.
Here are some articles on the phenomenon in play here (full disclosure: we both suffer from it):
> "Best known explanation" is inherently socially constructed, as it requires consensus
For Allistic people (Normies), yes. But I suffer from autism, and I have weaponized it: I have chosen "Defect"[2] in this little game you people are playing. I see you (but only to the degree that I can, "pedantically"/tautologically), but you cannot see me (in the same way). I can intercept and attach a debugger "to a substantial degree" to my thinking, you do not have this ability. You are bound by culture.
Bold claims, eh! Watch this, I will now make a bold prediction of the future: you will[3] ~declare (implicitly or explicitly) yourself to be correct, and me incorrect, and as proof you will present a narrative based story. What you will not do: acknowledge what is going on here (you are expressing your opinion at best, etc), and what the true epistemic status(es) of this situation is: unknown[4].
There seems to be this weird phenomenon whereby when you point consciousness at itself, it starts behaving strangely. I have very little evidence of this other than large quantities of observation, but I have developed a strong intuition that there is something hardcoded in us that disallows that. This is obviously a "way out there, woo woo level" belief, and it is seems inconsistent with the theory of evolution (at least in the way it manifests), so I am not sure what to make of it. I can see why the ability (for conscious reflection) is uncommon, but I cannot see why a hardwired inability is ~ubiquitous. I wonder if it is somehow similar to how incest is repulsive...except that is taught to us quite explicitly, whereas if anything the opposite seems to be true of self-reflection (which is why it seems ~supernatural to me).
------------------------
[1] I use quotation marks because I am using the word colloquially (how Allistic people experience the word), not technically (consistent with the actual definition).
[3] This is one option, there seem to be about 4 choices (that are accessible) when a Human is put into this setting; doubling down with more story telling tends to be most common
[4] Full disclosure: this (the entire sentence) is (partially) a trick - I am testing if an explicit, unmistakable challenge to (at least attempt) ~transcendence might work. At the very least, it creates a fun elephant in the room situation. See also: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FourthWall
The stories do match over time in some domains though. Notably many (but not all) scientific domains, but also in a lot of day-to-day interactions. That's arguably what makes scientific theories so useful.
Not the person you're responding to but for me that's compelling evidence that there is something like an objective reality out there (even if apes can't perceive it clearly).
They do not match over time (or geography) at the societal/cultural level is what I was getting at - the dominant metaphysical framework of the time/location determines what is "true", and often even what "is".
Also: science can change its story whenever it likes[1], and this is to its benefit (of reputation) rather than its detriment.
Science has the best rhetoric/marketing game in existence imho. Whether it is the best possible remains to be seen.
[1] Christianity did this too with The New Testament, which satisfies those who subscribe to that framework, but it is highly vulnerable to an attack from other ideologies with better game (currently: only science).
Yeah, I agree with you on the truth front. It's a pretty slippery concept, and indeed our best "model" of truth has changed many times, even in realms like mathematics where you'd think that stuff would have been nailed down by now.
But I also think you're making a bit of a map/territory conflation. I think what "is" has nothing to do with human culture - you drop a rock from head height, it's going to hit your foot, and this is "true" (observable maybe a better word) regardless of who you are (and more importantly, regardless of what you claim!). This is what I meant by the stories matching over time in some domains.
The ontological claims (the "map") change all the time in science, as they must! But I don't think reality (the "territory") does, in the same way that the ocean doesn't manifest dragons if I draw one on a seafaring chart.
Completely agree that science may not be the best epistemic theory possible. In fact, I'd stick my neck out and say that the scientific habit of reductionism seems to be floundering for things like complex biological systems (brains/ecologies/controversially even consciousness?) and maybe even understanding machine learning models. Perhaps we'll see some interesting developments in the next few decades =)
> I think what "is" has nothing to do with human culture - you drop a rock from head height, it's going to hit your foot, and this is "true" (observable maybe a better word) regardless of who you are (and more importantly, regardless of what you claim!). This is what I meant by the stories matching over time in some domains.
Right....but:
- what is that has nothing to do with human culture (or consciousness, or the machines we build) is only a subset of the larger set of what is
- quite often, humans drop rocks and other things onto the heads of other humans - religion has always got a lot of blame for this phenomenon, but a lesser known fact is that science plays a massive role in it as well: giving us the technology to do it in ever more powerful and affordable ways
> This is what I meant by the stories matching over time in some domains.
Some stories match, some do not. Religion also has plenty of each.
> But I don't think reality (the "territory") does, in the same way that the ocean doesn't manifest dragons if I draw one on a seafaring chart.
Dragons may not exist in The Universe, but that doesn't mean they can't can exist in reality.
If you don't believe me, go do a survey of the general public about things that "don't exist" and see what kind of results you get. For bonus results, try disagreeing with some people and see how that goes over.
> Completely agree that science may not be the best epistemic theory possible.
You and I are members of an exclusive group!
> that the scientific habit of reductionism seems to be floundering for things like complex biological systems (brains/ecologies/controversially even consciousness?) and maybe even understanding machine learning models.
Also: Reality.
> Perhaps we'll see some interesting developments in the next few decades =)
Ah, I think I'm starting to see where you're coming from. I'm using "reality" in the pretty narrow sense of the physical universe (Popper's world 1?), which I guess is actually quite hypocritical given that I'm also attacking the common (semi-religious) belief that everything can be reduced scientifically to fundamental physical interactions.
Ideas seem to have a dynamics of their own, and I'm pretty open-minded to the possibility that things which exist in the collective human mental substrate (world 2?) can exert causal influence of their own, in a certain sense, on world 1. In a way that maybe can't be reduced to physical interaction in any kind of useful predictive fashion?
I don't have the language to think about those concepts clearly right now!
You've left me with lots to ponder, thanks =) it's actually very cool to see Popper himself talking about the metaphysics of this stuff. Some of my physics friends would probably be a bit shocked by that...
Popper's three worlds is one of my favorites to lay on science fans, because they typically love them some Popper, and an enemy in their own ranks is just too good to go to waste!! :)
Yeah this comment also points to William James and the rest of the Pragmatists. Something is true if and only if it is useful. Our good scientific theories are good specifically and solely because they're useful to us -- their actual underlying truth is not only indiscernible outside of the context of validating useful claims, but any such concept of "underlying truth" (below/separately from what's useful) doesn't even have meaning.
You know this already, I think, but a pretty widely-used metric of utility in science is whether or not:
a) a theory makes predictions that match the results of a set of prescribed experiments
b) those results are reproducible by unrelated third parties following the same experimental guidelines
For some theories like EM we're at the point where the body of known experiments and predictions is so vast, and so many edge-cases have been probed, that we basically expect the results to generalise to the known universe.
But yeah, there's a long tail of science with a much weaker claim to "truth" or utility than this. I agree with you (I think? might have misunderstood you) that it starts to become more of a cultural or social phenomenon in these cases.
> it starts to become more of a cultural or social phenomenon in these cases.
Very much part of my concern. And within that there is the phenomenon whereby the harm science causes (say, global warming") somehow doesn't count. Only the end users of the things science brought into existence bear any burden of responsibility.
Provide a definition of consciousness that isn’t circular and we can get a discussion going.
That’s the thing that seems to be missing from every one of these discussions… everyone just seems to assume some vague, fuzzy definition of consciousness and nobody calls anyone on it.
My 2¢: we don’t have a working definition of consciousness. Every attempt at doing so is self referential and/or completely subjective. The term is meaningless and every discussion on whether something is conscious or not is a complete waste of time and energy.
There is no requirement for definition. Each and everyone of us (gpt bots excluded) experiences consciousness continually, in various modalities. The experience is shared.
For example, considering the nature of consciousness and the possible mechanics behind it, we could consider sights. Seeing. We all see things in our minds (and only in our minds!) and we have the first 1/2 of the process pathway mapped out. Light hits a matrix of cells in the 'sensor' which then encodes the sensory data as chemical signals which then side-effect a neural net.
Kindly explain -- using physics -- to YOURSELF how you got from a changed states to perception of light in your mind. The experience of consciousness is not a mystery nor is it 'obscure'. Follow up is to note that it is equally wrongheaded to ask if a rock or something/someone else is conscious.
Can you explain what you experience in terms of known science and please no hand waving about 'the most complex structure in universe'. The said structure changes states. There is no 'projection room' in the "neural net". There is no decoding final stage that takes matrix input and maps it to a 2D representation (generative AI) etc.
Sure there is. If the subject of discussion is “is X a kind of Y?”, you can’t proceed without defining Y. Saying “duh, you know what Y is” doesn’t change this. I could have a very different definition of Y in my head than you, and the discussion quickly spirals into madness as we all talk right past each other.
> Each and everyone of us (gpt bots excluded) experiences consciousness continually, in various modalities. The experience is shared.
If the definition of consciousness is simply “that thing that we in particular have”, then of course nothing else has consciousness, because you’ve excluded everything but us by definition! Yawn. What a boring discussion.
The rest of your comment proceeds similarly, with the conclusion that we need to be able to explain our particular experiences. Of course nothing else has consciousness if this is our working definition. If “consciousness” is that thing that arises from what a human brain does, then yeah sure, only a human brain has it. But if you actually make an attempt to classify it by defining it in a non-trivial, non-circular way, you’ll find that nearly everything about it can be applied to non-humans too.
Ho hum, I’m bored. These discussions are just pointless.
(No, I’m not going to try and define consciousness, because I maintain that there is no definition. You can say anything you want about it and be equally wrong or right, it doesn’t really matter because it means whatever you want it to.)
As I said, the matter of consciousness is a shared experience. By denying its concrete reality due to difficulty of communicating this experience you open the door to nonsense such as LLMs being "conscious" because then people like you line up to claim "define consciousness".
> If the definition of consciousness is simply ...
No one is defining consciousness. You are simply referred to what is expected to be a common shared experience. Then the question is posed to you: please explain to yourself how (merely) a structure is affording the phenomena of what you experience. Physics only please.
This is sufficient to dethrone any purely structural notions. Which is huge, actually. And informative.
Insisting on "what is the definition" allow for various nonsense, hand waving, and large claims regarding the nature of some mechanism.
> Ho hum, I’m bored. These discussions are just pointless.
QED. That's because you insist on missing the point. Naturally it makes for boring discussion. Choose to not engage in such discussions if not contributing anything beyond the red herring of lack of definition for consciousness.
> No one is defining consciousness. You are simply referred to what is expected to be a common shared experience.
Our shared experience is a real
thing, yes. But it’s worthless to ask whether something that’s not a human has our shared experience, because we’ve excluded it by definition. If you asked “does ChatGPT experience the world identically to the way we do?”, the answer is trivially “no”, since we’re human and it’s an LLM. But if you change the question to “is ChatGPT conscious?”, suddenly this is supposed to be a less trivial question? No, you said yourself, nobody’s even willing to define consciousness, and when prodded, we default to “that thing we have”, and how exactly is that supposed to illuminate anyone towards a meaningful answer to the question.
Of course ChatGPT is not a human, duh. If you aren’t willing to state your terms, and “consciousness” isn’t willing to be defined an inch past our noses, then it ceases to be a useful to discussion to ask whether anything is conscious.
> please explain to yourself how (merely) a structure is affording the phenomena of what you experience. Physics only please.
The structure and what I experience are the same thing. My brain/senses/body apparatus is a thing that by its very construction includes the ability to ponder and reason about stuff, and experience the world. It is this way because it is this way. There is no “me” separate from the structure, so there is no ability to ask “how do I experience the world given only this structure?”
I believe this is where our cognitive abilities essentially run up against the incompleteness theorem. Everything we can possibly conceive of is happening inside consciousness. There’s no way for us to define the system from inside the system.
Like trying to define the boundaries of the universe (with the caveat that of course there’s nothing outside the universe and there’s presumably stuff outside of consciousness, just we never experience it directly)
We are conditioned to be dumb. To be clear, I'm not saying it's necessarily intentional (though I am very suspicious), but it isn't physics or (only) Mother Nature that's caused the problem, it is our own actions, or lack thereof. People cannot think about consciousness skilfully for the same reason most people can't think about physics skilfully: it requires particular education. And it isn't just consciousness that requires special education, have you seen the train wreck that politics/geopolitics and economics are? Heck, we can't even reproduce any more in a lot of Western countries.
> There’s no way for us to define the system from inside the system.
How could one know such a thing? Plus, Humans "define" things all the time, there is no requirement for any the stories we tell each other to be correct. People (and the smarter the better) seem to downright revel in it.
> Like trying to define the boundaries of the universe (with the caveat that of course...
Yes, of course.
See how easy it is!
> just we never experience it directly
How could you possibly know the entirety of all human experiences? Let me guess: a story? Perhaps one based on critical thinking and science, that makes complete sense (so it must be true, as per critical thinking)?
Everything 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".
Subjective 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.
I don't think we _all_ point at cat's behavior and conclude consciousness. I think its the behaviors you describe plus we see how anatomically similar to humans they are. As someone who believes consciousness is an emergent property of the configuration of matter that makes up our bodies, particularly our brains, it seems plausible that cats have some sort of recognizable version of experience to ours (though I'm very amenable to discovering that actually they don't).
But also jellyfish has goal seeking behavior, and a most of those other characteristics you mention, and my intuition (based on the vastly different neural structure and anatomy), is that they experience probably nothing.
My strong personal assessment of this is that panpsychists (in general, if you can pin one down) are not talking about consciousness in a colloquial sense - but I think this is a mistake.
I think the common conceptualization of consciousness is the only definition that is useful, or makes sense. Which is something that can experience things. For many reasons, I don't think these rudimentary behaviors in plants suggest they are capable of experience.
I know I see the color red in a particular way. I have a consciousness experience of seeing red things that _feels like_ something. I can talk about wavelengths, or put color into a theory, but none of this explains the feeling of seeing the color red.
How do I know if someone else has the same subjective experience as me regarding color, or taste, or thought form? I don't, it can't be known.
This "it can't be known" (unfeasibility of proving or disproving anything about this phenomenon) is enough for most science-like minds to discard all of this as nonsense. For these, there is no phenomenon, this subjective experience arises from emerging properties.
The emerging properties model is not unfeasible, we could test it, if we were able to observe these properties emerging. However, we didn't, it's hard. Although feasible, it has not been proven or disproven, and modeling the brain has been a challenge.
So, for now, the only thing you can point and say "that is a conscious being" with abolsute confidence is yourself. Only you know that, and you can't share that proof. This notion was popularized as the philosophical zombies thought experiment.
Maybe it is a tool trying to optimize food acquisition. That's not a completely unreasonable idea. But how would you go about testing that hypothesis? How can you know that some abstract process is working when you can't even prove to others it exists?
"The emerging properties model is not unfeasible, we could test it"
One thing you can do is disrupt the smaller individual components that make up the emergent property, and see if the property continues to exist.
I.e. you can put a motorized egg beater in your brain, and see if you still have the emergent properties of consciousness. My prediction is that the property will suddenly disappear.
Or can cut off blood to the brain for a little while.
The counter-argument will be that the consciousness unrecognizably changes, and once the blood comes back, that configuration of matter generally restores. None of this is convincing to me in any way, and I genuinely desperately want someone (a panpsychist) to explain how I'm thinking about this incorrectly.
If I cut out the antenna of my radio, radio waves don't cease to exist. I just broke a perfectly good radio. There are also many ways to break a radio that have nothing to do with its ability to capture radio waves.
I'm not implying consciousness is some mythical undiscovered force. My point is: How would you know if the components that you are toying with are indeed relevant to consciousness and not some proxy or supporting structure?
The answer is: you can't know. You can reach lesser conclusions (under the effect of drug X, area Y of the brain has decreased activity, resulting in change of behavior Z), but it says nothing about that subjective experience I mentioned earlier (qualia).
I don't doubt we could brute force this into a meaningful discovery, carefully mapping each part of the brain until we figure it out completely, including qualia. We're not there yet though.
While I don't like the radio analogy, I think we largely agree then.
If interested, the reason I don't like the radio analogy is that it presupposes that the configuration of the brain, and inputs isn't fundamentally the constituents of consciousness.
On the flip side, to fix the analogy: if I cut off the antenna of a radio, I would argue it ceases to become a radio by any reasonable definition (assuming we're talking about a device that receives radio waves and plays them back in the form of sound). You just have something that's very close to a radio. It has nothing to do with whether radio waves exist or don't.
As long as you agree that it's conceivable that there's experimentation (brute force or otherwise), then I think we're on the same page.
I'm not willing to abandon reproducibility, so I'm not on the "let's just philosophize and stuff" side, although I think it's relevant to do so.
I think the onus is on the brain folks. In order to solve this, they need to prove that qualia lives as an emergent property in the brain. I'm not presuposing tht the consciousness lives somewhere outside the brain, I'm asking for proof that it does (which is reasonable).
What we have is proof of neither and no way to get there. The reductionist approach offers a more systematic way of approaching the problem, but there are no guarantees. Breaking down a problem into smaller questions is not a proof if there are still smaller questions unanswered.
The 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
This 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).
Which 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.
People 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.
Plate 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.
I 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.
Evolutionary 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.
Evolutionary 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?
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?
If 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.
I 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.
I 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."
> 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
Okay well that's silly and I've not met even one panpsychist who believes this "comparable to human conscious experience" portion
> Once you even slightly disrupt the structure of our brains functioning, it all falls apart. We feel nothing.
This isn't true. You can literally cut a brain in half and you appear to get two separate consciousnesses in one skull.
> I think even most panpsychists would ...
Sure... so why are you spending so much breath attacking the obviously weak form of the argument?
> ^and if it's the second case, it's unprovable and uninteresting and "literally meaningless. Irrelevant."
There have been lots of things, in fact pretty much all of them, that were unprovable and uninteresting until they weren't. People have to work hard to build the frameworks to talk about, test, and ultimately understand the universe. That's what people are trying to do with consciousness. It can be "too early" for your tastes, but that doesn't make the endeavor meaningless.
> Okay well that's silly and I've not met even one panpsychist who believes this "comparable to human conscious experience" portion
You, yourself, and Philip Goff and others talk about how "we might want to treat trees differently" suggesting (correct me if I'm misunderstanding you) that cutting a tree might "hurt" the tree, or cause "pain" to the tree, which is exactly what I mean by "comparable to human conscious experience."
> This isn't true. You can literally cut a brain in half and you appear to get two separate consciousnesses in one skull.
What you're saying doesn't address what I'm saying. I did not say that, exhaustively, all changes to the brain disrupt everything. Rather, I will clarify that there exist a subset of extremely small disruptions you can make to the brain that "turn the lights off" of consciousness in humans. Among them are a fairly tiny dose of anesthetic, or not breathing for about 5 minutes.
> Sure... so why are you spending so much breath attacking the obviously weak form of the argument?
Because I'm replying to a comment that suggests we might treat trees differently (if Panpsychicism were true). I would consider a statement like that to be the first category of panpsychist.
> ... but that doesn't make the endeavor meaningless.
I didn't say the endeavor is meaningless. I'm a strong proponent of prodding anything we can about consciousness, or anything in our universe for that matter. What's "too early for my tastes" is to believe the Panpsychist hypothesis is currently the best explanation.
Emergent property of a sophisticated brain (with it's own weaknesses).
But even if I didn't have a more compelling explanation, that doesn't mean I can't be highly critical of, or reach a conclusion that panpsychicism is highly unlikely to be approaching a good explanation.
But also, see the rest of my comment. The onus is not on me to arrive with a better explanation just because there's a bad explanation on the table.
If I come home and find a cookie on my counter, and someone said "I think that a space alien teleported the cookie there" and I said "I think that's unlikely to be the correct explanation." And then that person asked "Well, what's a better explanation?" and I said "Maybe someone broke into my apartment, felt guilty, and left a cookie there." and then grilled me on that counter-explanation.
I genuinely think emergent property of sophisticated brain is much closer to the correct explanation than panpsychism in terms of usefulness, predictive power, etc., and likelihood of getting closer to a satisfying answer. On the other hand, I'm not prepared to defend every aspect of that hypothesis. I am, however, prepared to criticize panpsychism.
I 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".
But 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.
> 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?
I 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.
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.
consciousness 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!
I 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.
Probably 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.
Nature'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.
what if we have grossly anthropomorphized consciousness, and it is really a simple, or fundamental [universal] process of informatic mis/matching rules.
You 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.
The point is that the "intelligence" of the various ChatGPT systems increases with size. Imputing intelligence to very simple systems skips over that. That's the "size" issue.
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.