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Comment by mellosouls | Hacker News Reader

My personal preference is for panexperientialism (essentially a bare bones panpsychism), with the idea that the phenomenon is somehow connected with change, and belongs to anything capable of change in some way and is probably a fundamental property of nature, as fundamental as space or time.

It's important to divorce consciousness from all ideas of "thought", "will" etc. to consider it's essence which is more connected with "awareness of being", though even that is too complex I think.

Obviously this is complete conjecture, but it has growing philosophical support - at least as an idea worth discussing - I think.

http://www.eoht.info/page/Panexperientialism

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Probably because consciousness requires some kind of underlying mental processes, which take time to achieve. I can only guess that it's similar to an instance of a computer program such as a web browser, i.e., it isn't a "thing" itself but is built out of a multitude of underlying calculations on a physical computer.

This also implies to me that consciousness, not being a physical thing itself, comes and goes within the brain, with the sleep cycle or just through lack of attention. The only interaction between one instance of consciousness and the following one would then be via memories.

= emergent ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergentism, yes it's clear that a lot has already been written about this kind of idea.

A difficulty is that it may interact with questions about the nature of existence and the nature of time. Would consciousness work properly in a deterministic block universe? What would be the relationship between my consciousness now and my consciousness of 10 seconds ago, do they both exist independently? Could you have consciousness that worked in a spacial dimension instead of time, by writing out the relevant calculations on a sheet of paper?

Funny, I thought about something very similar : could some path in the Mandelbrot set (or any other fractal) be called "conscious" ?

consciousness does not require a brain. consciousness is fundamental to the universe

Indeed. To go even farther, I suspect that there is nothing other than consciousness. There are no particles and forces, only awareness and will. The stuff of physics is emergent from statistical properties of consciousness over a large scale.

> Indeed. To go even farther, I suspect that there is nothing other than consciousness. There are no particles and forces, only awareness and will.

I believe the word for that is idealism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/berkeley/

Assertions aren't particularly helpful in this discussion. What reasons are there to think this is true?

That is certainly one hypothesis that has not yet been eliminated.

consciousness requires some kind of underlying mental processes

Assuming you mean cognition, this is essentially the opposite of the idea of panexperientialism, or at least not compatible.

Yes. The way I think about it, to be conscious, one has to be conscious of something. The only way to do that is to have a representation of that thing in memory. When the representation matches incoming sense data we then perceive the relevant thing.

Thus, a single atom cannot be conscious. It could at a stretch be regarded as a miniature body, perhaps, but could it contain a memory system? Presumably not.

Isn't it actually what panexperientalism is?

The universe is one giant state machine with the memory of it's current state and it's current state deciding what to invoke next.

I don't know about panexperientialism. My understanding of panpsychism is that it means that everything in the universe is at least a little bit conscious. Which I doubt for the reasons I gave. I don't see how the universe as a whole could be conscious, either, any more than a child in the womb could be. There's not enough interaction between its body and the environment. Of course the universe as a whole lacks any environment.

Why not entertain the notion that matter is consciousness? It doesn't just feel like something to be a particular atom, that particular atom exists because it feels like something to be that particular atom.

I'm happy to entertain it, but

that particular atom exists because it feels like something to be that particular atom

seems to beg the question somewhat - where is "feeling like something" coming from?

>where is "feeling like something" coming from?

Everytime I think about this, I end up with "the fact that something is not in the state it desires to be in seems sufficient and necessary".

Maybe electrochemical imbalance is what's experienced as consciousness, all the way down to the smallest particles (or even beyond) - then, organic consciousness would just be an immense abstraction of the same thing that drives physics itself.

I feel like this is satisfying, but then again, I'm not Joscha Bach :-)

It's axiomatic. The universe exists because feeling exists. Physical matter is subjective experience. More complex matter up to and including the human brain represents more complex states of subjective experience. The processes in the brain feel like something because a process is a thing.

If my consciousness is only the consciousness of a particular atom, or more likely a fundamental particle like an electron, why do I have the illusion that I'm an entire human animal? How would my vision, for example, be sent to every election in my body, for it to be independently conscious?

And why can cancer hide from my consciousness? If we are a single particle, we can't possibly interact with the others in the way we do - why is that one particle special. And if we are a gestalt, why is it that some of the parts are less important than others. Nerves nicely explain why we are more aware of our hands and lips than the action of our appendix - a singular atomic consciousness can't, and neither can an equally weighted gestalt.

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