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I don’t disagree with the problems you describe, but I don’t think panpsychism explains any of these problems either. It’s a non-answer, and functionally equivalent to saying nothing about consciousness. The “evolutionary illusion” you describe is precisely what we’re trying to understand: the brain is doing an extraordinary magic trick and no one knows how.

Given what artificial neural networks are already capable of, it shouldn't seem like a magic trick what our own brains are capable of (from the outside).

The hang up is on the inside right? You have an essence to your consciousness experience that you believe a fly, bacteria, rock, computer, artificial neural network may or may not have.

Panpsychism does answer that question by saying yes, they all have some sliver of consciousness. Two atoms bumping together at some level experience the interaction.

I agree the theory doesn't have answers as to how or what the essence of consciousness is. But I definitely seeing it as a stepping stone towards that goal.

Simply answering a question with "Yes" without providing evidence or a deeper explanation seems pretty useless and like no additional knowledge was gained.

Pansychism seems to explain a lot of the hard questions. Even without a deeper understanding than 'there is a single conscious and you are a piece of it', simply thinking that way changes the understanding of life/death. You are unknowingly everyone. Punching a guy is on some level punching yourself. The afterlife is irrelevant, when you die you go on existing as the other 7 billion humans, plus animals, etc... This is why philosophers and neuroscientists alike a so excited about the idea and writing papers about it.

I'm curious, could you list the things that you think Anns can do that underpin your argument?

Well, that might just be because there's not actually much to say about consciousness. If you strip all the things we know it's not (memory, thoughts, etc) we're actually left with very little, if anything.

I think this is also what some meditation based philosophies are trying to teach. That is, they're saying something along the lines of: you are in one way everything at once, but you are not any of the things you think you are. They spend a lot of effort trying to teach people, essentially nothing. Not just the label "nothing" but something like a deep realisation of the concept.

My main problem with this philosophy is figuring out why we're conscious of a very specific subset of things at a time. Does the brain create a kind of nexus where several items of complex information are available in a small physical, and that makes it easy to be conscious of these things at once? But what limits it?

And the other problem is the link between consciousness and action. Most actions seem like a product of cause-and-effect.. but at the very least it seems that the existence of consciousness is making us talk about consciousness.

Even when you strip out those other concepts, which you probably shouldn't, there is an underlying element of conscious awareness that is not "nothing," but an awareness of nothing, like the "I" in "I think therefore I am."

My problem is that people confuse talking poetically about consciousness with actually coming to a conclusion about how this thing works.

Maybe I misunderstand the concept, but when we are newly born we are somewhat not conscious in the usual sense of self. In that theory does it mean we, or our atoms are already conscious but we dont have the awareness yet? Because our brain is first producing a trick of the perception of self once it is fully developed?

In the spiritual world many advanced people have had these experiences of oneness with the world once they learn to fully strip the mind from all conditioning and cocneption of self. So it seems to me like the concept of embodied swlf and consciousnes are two things that can be seperated. Does that make any sense?

You are hitting the right target. Looking at recurrent neural nets. Finite impulse responses. A consciousness experience is merely a transformation of external reality over time and space. It can tangle the left leg with the thumb, the past with the present. For simple entities, like electrons, their lack of memory means that entanglement will be extremely basic. For more complex things that involve more tangled transformations of reality through space and time, thatll mean a greater amount of awareness of the center of that tangle.

For us, the center of the tangle is our bodies, located, and present. But like you said, babies are very much just passthroughs like the electron. The only difference is that they are storing a ton, the storage just isnt being used in any capacity, its passively sitting there. As the storage begins to become used, and sent to interfere with the present and future inputs, then self awareness results in the form of the intersection.

Good observations..!

I like it aesthetically, but fundamentally I think it dodges the question. It dilutes consciousness to be mostly unconscious, and then it can be applied to anything.

I like the idea that everything is conscious, but without diluting what consciousness is. It's anthrocentric and magical, thinking that atoms have inner monologues and concepts of self, but it's better defined than the panpsychist consciousness as you describe it.

Like most philosophies, pansychism has multiple flavours. To me, the combination problem is concrete. The physical location of my awareness seems to be inside the head and not my hand, even though both are made of atoms. ‘Everything is conscious’ fails to account for that.

The only reason your awareness seems to be inside of your head is because your head and face is your primary interface with the world, where the core of your senses reside and is, therefore, your default state.

You can test this hypothesis by practicing a meditation technique called "body scanning" where you allow your awareness to focus into various parts of the body, leaving your head and indeed entering your hand for example.

As an aside, I wonder if Helen Keller's default location of awareness was in her hands because they were her interface with the world? It seems unlikely to me that it would be in her head/face but I really have no idea.

I doubt that meditation techniques would allow you to stay conscious after something destroys your brain.

Center of awareness isn't about where you have your CPU (that's always in the head) - it's about where your perceived "self" is. I remember reading from his biography that Feynman successfully learned to move it around, within and outside of his body, through those meditation techniques. This neatly accounts for OOBEs, making them nothing special too.

EDIT: to be clear, I'm arguing that the perceived location of your "self" is just that - a perceived location. An arbitrary frame of reference that defaults to one's head, but can be moved around. I.e. something worthless as evidence for panpsychism.

Just because we perceive something doesn't make it real. I think that's the issue here. By what mechanisms do we prove the perception is congruent with reality?

I believe this was all in response to the idea that “it _feels_ like consciousness is in the head/brain” being an argument against panpsychism.

That one can do things such that it _feels like_ one’s consciousness is elsewhere, seems to go against that point?

Though, a similar point of “if a person loses their head, their consciousness seems to go away. Their hands do not move independently.” And “ If, as panpsychism claims, their hands are also conscious, what must it be like for their movement to be directed by consciousness outside of itself?”

> I believe this was all in response to the idea that “it _feels_ like consciousness is in the head/brain” being an argument against panpsychism.

I'm trying to argue against panpsychism by noting that the place where it "feels like" consciousness is is completely arbitrary and one can learn to move it around, so this feeling is useless as evidence for panpsychism.

It feels like such only because the eyes, nose, and number of nerves in the head and face. If the sensors were centered elsewhere, it might feel like it were elsewhere...

As grim as it is, and depending on your degree of skepticism: craniotomy, psychoactive drugs, concussions, etc..

Reminds me of the scene in Ex Machina where he cuts himself to make sure he still bleeds - a physical realization of a turing test.

The physical awareness of the self used to be in the chest during the centuries where people thought the brain is just a blood-cooling organ.

Ask some small children where their self is, and some of those who haven't be told much about the brain will point to the chest or another location.

If these conscious experiences of particles are entirely encapsulated within them, and not manifested in their external behaviour, then I don't see how any form of aggregate consciousnesses could form. If the atoms of my body are conscious, what does that have to do with the consciousness of my brain? It can only be relevant if those consciousnesses interact or merge or coalesce in some way, and how can they do that without interacting beyond the interactions described by physics?

Clearly my consciousness has physical consequences. I am an active agent and act consciously. Therefore if my consciousness is composed of these, then the consciousness of those particles must have physical, measurable consequences that should be testable.

The fact that this line of reasoning is entirely absent from any of these philosophical ruminations is I think telling.

Like Fourier analysis, every component sine wave is conscious, and every possible superposition of sine waves is also conscious. It's turtles all the way down.

What does it mean for an atom, an electron, a sine wave to be conscious? What can it perceive, consider, how can it act? But those are awarenesss, reason, agency... distinct from "consciousness".

Just because an entity cannot assert itself, does not mean it is not conscious.

But at this point, what are you actually saying? What does turtles-all-the-way-down consciousness actually pick out? I have a hard time seeing it as informative. That is, the statement "everything is conscious" is doing no work for you in describing the thing in question.

I'm merely elaborating/expanding to show the extremity of "everything is conscious".

> Just because an entity cannot assert itself, does not mean it is not conscious.

This does not give any more purchase on the world than we currently have. It’s similar to saying that just because we have never seen laws of physics change, it doesn’t mean they can’t change. Of course, that may or may not be true. But would you bet on sun not rising tomorrow? New scientific theories / entities must have give us additional predictive power (grip) than what’s currently possible. Otherwise why invent new assumptions?

For sure. The one thing it does is "solve" the problem of consciousness in a surprising, entertaining, and absurd way.