Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

To build on your thought experiment:

> So the question is, this simulated brain, which is behaving very similarly indeed to a biological brain: does it have consciousness? Does it feel?

If you answer "yes" to this question, what happens if you split the computations of that simulated brain over a million people equipped with pen and paper? Where is its consciousness happening now?

I have yet to hear a satisfying answer from anyone who believes that an AGI will automatically be conscious. But then again, I have yet to hear a satisfying explanation of consciousness from anyone...

> you start with a baby brain and let it grow up

You can grow biological brain structures from stem cell. It's called Brain Organoids and Neural Organoids, that may one day be used in machines and may one day have consciousness properties. Interview about this with Lex Fridman (MIT Artificial Intelligence teacher) and Paola Arlotta (Harvard brain neuroscientist): https://lexfridman.com/paola-arlotta/

> We don’t think of a few cells as having consciousness, but somehow the broader collection does.

This is called "emergent property" (see "Emergence" in Wikipedia), that is a sub-area of Complex Systems theory. There's a theory that states it may be possible that consciousness may appear as an emergent property from a high complex, dynamical and evolutionary AI system.

> imagine an incredibly-detailed computer simulation

Some paradigms to approach AGI (Artificial General Intelligence / Superintelligence) are: 1. Simulate the brain in low level details; 2. Simulate the functioning of higher level structures of the brain (cortical columns, visual cortex, hippocampus...); 3. Create artificial neurons (that can be used to neural networks, deep learning, etc.); 4. Simulating simple brains and nervous systems (e.g jellyfish, insects, C.elegans connectome project, etc) to understand how intelligence works; 5. Simulating the behavior of the brain ("cognitive architectures"); 6. Creating en evolutionary system that could converge to brain-like funcionality.

It's interesting we don't have much idea about it yet.

It probably helps to think about some edge cases to get some insight.

What happens when you sleep and you loose sense of conciousness?

What happens in cases of brain injury where concousiness goes into weird failure modes - thinking it wakes up on the same state every day, thinking it's -1month or so, collapsing etc.

What happens in cases of distorted/malfunctioning brain schizophrenia etc.

I've read somewhere that if you put implant which mimics neuron activity, your brain will build structure around it just like with normal neurons. What would happen if you take 1 square mm of brain and replace it with implant, slowly replacing the whole brain? What happens when you attach brain to larger structure/orders of magnitude more complex one, will conciousness transfer there? Can you disconnect original brain leaving conciousness?

As we don't have powerfull computers yet to compete with brain, is it possible to connect two brains instead?

Memory is likely playing central role. You are what you remember it seems. Can you boost memory capacity with some implants, will it make more-conciousness?

There are many not yet feasible experiments, but some should be. Also completely brutal in many cases.

The problem is time and experience, two things you cannot give to a software mind. Humans are inherently social and our brains are developed over socializing time. Our brains are shaped by fetal, post-natal, and childhood socialization and experience. The craziest edge cases of human childhood show: if you grow up without socialization, in isolation/solitude, your brain will be vastly underdeveloped and you will have very serious personality deformation.

So no, I don't think it's possible to create a simulated brain that behaves similarly as a human, as the biological medium is in a constant state of dissolution, repair, evolution, and adaptation. This is how we learn, get stressed, get tired, get certain emotions...it's a whole new layer of programming you'd need to perfect beyond just replicating a brain at one moment in time.

A brain in silico would be apples:oranges different than a biological brain.

> down to the level of individual cells and neurotransmitters

My guess? No, it won’t be conscious or even meaningful.

More fundamentally, our inability to answer this question drives at our ignorance of our own neurology. We don’t know the building blocks of thought. It might happen at the neurochemical or electrochemical level. It may even depend on quantum effects.

> So the question is, this simulated brain, which is behaving very similarly indeed to a biological brain: does it have consciousness? Does it feel?

I think there are more easily accessible examples that investigate this problem closer. Are animals conscious? How about children? How about very slow people?

If you create zombies people are going to be upset with you.

We probably are not yet able to tell if we can simulate a brain fully, with something we call a computer nowadays.

If we can, then indeed consciousness comes from the collective function of individual cells. But maybe there's more to the workings of the brain?

> imagine an incredibly-detailed computer simulation of a brain, down to the level of individual cells and neurotransmitters. (While this is beyond our current capabilities, it is in principle possible.)

The laws of physics start to become relevant here. It is quite likely that it is not possible to simulate a human brain using a classical computer, at least not at any kind of speed such that it can experience the world as we do.

There is an extension of that idea, which is to suppose that we could make a silicon neuron that can perfectly replace an organic one (state and all). Then you can replace neurons in the brain one by one, and the brain carries on functioning exactly like it always has.

Eventually the brain is entirely silicon, but to the owner subjectively nothing has changed, they are as 'conscious' as they ever were.

> So the question is, this simulated brain, which is behaving very similarly indeed to a biological brain: does it have consciousness? Does it feel?

I worry we'll never know the answer to this, even if we manage to pull off such a simulation.

Ok, you can have the simulation of cells and neurotramsmitters, but what is the model of how they work? You are justmaking stuff up. It is not the same at all. It's cargo-cult level hubris.

That's the boat problem. Over time theseus' ship had every board and nail replaced (to preserve it). Is the ship still the same ship?

The Goff answer to this is that since you've used intrinsically conscious matter to build this machine, it is conscious.

Feelings are just that: numbers. A combination of tiny electrical currents and chemicals moving around inside your head.

I would never make a copy of my brain (or somebody else's) with the intention of disconnecting it later.

> An interesting

Not really.

> So the question is, this simulated brain, which is behaving very similarly indeed to a biological brain: does it have consciousness?

Obviously yes. Either that or our brains are filled with magic unicorn dust.

Your computer simulation does not solve the "stopping problem". This means that the artificial brain does not know what is good or what is bad. It can not know everything about itself. So the brain will be completely unstable and fail after a while.

On the other hand, if there is some guiding (like a programmer), the artificial brain can be functional. If the real brain would be guided by some kind of consciousness, this would work the same.

The consciousness needs to be in a different dimension, in a way that physics does not change. So it would be like a 2D pool table, where we can describe exactly the movement of every ball. But sometimes a ball gets hit by a player, outside the table. And this gives us events that bring the balls to a certain direction.

In similar sense the brain can be played by a consciousness to get it working. In a way that is very hard to detect with physical instruments.

> I'm not sure if panpsychism is necessarily a path forward in terms of describing the universe, but I think it seems promising in terms of a prescriptive use of creating, or attempting to create, new consciousness with machines.

If panpsychism is correct, then all of our machines would already be conscious. Creating new consciousness wouldn't be possible except maybe in the sense that matter itself can be created under certain conditions. What I think you're trying to say is that it might be possible to assemble machines in such a way that a combined "machine consciousness" emerges from the separate low-level consciousnesses of its components. Which may or may not happen with every machine anyway, I'm not sure how you would devise an experiment to test for this.

> virtually no one is positing that a rock is conscious in the same way a human being is.

Well, I would argue that virtually no human is actually conscious in the way we tend to posit that humans are conscious.

I think we tend to underestimate the link between our understanding of our experience of consciousness and how memory formation and recall works.

Our own experience of our consciousness is as much an illusions as our experience of the world. When we consider and attempt to discuss our own experience of redness, we are generally left with only our memory of that experience which influenced be a great deal of post-processing, compression and abstraction. I believe the mental states in which you can actually experience pure redness is very different from the state in which you can attempt analyze and discuss that experience.

Thus I would posit that perhaps it is so much that the conscious experience of being a human and being a rock are different, but that they are processed, stored and understood differently.

Not sure if can even be attempted. If turns out to be a phenomenon that originates in a sub-Plank's scale then "machinery" isn't something conceptually possible there.

>> To what level is a human conscious if its component cells aren't?

That is like asking "how can a car be a vehicle if its component parts aren't vehicles?". But we know that we can make things with new properties by combining things that do not have those properties. E.g. dough is sticky, but neither water now flour are. Whiskey is alcoholic, but rye is not. etc etc.

The hierarchical question is answersed by this intuition: that combining things in herarchies yields new things that didn't exist before, and with properties that none of the original components had.

That's a good point. One things aliens have that we don't is the ability to merge and divide consciousnesses (like Vulcans do). This has been explored in science fiction but not so much in the real world. Although some siamese twins share a consciousness:

https://www.cbc.ca/cbcdocspov/features/the-hogan-twins-share...

Within the next 10 or 20 years, we'll have the technology to connect brains to computers, and eventually join brains together and separate them. That will at least give us a theory of how the basic building blocks of consciousness work, perhaps along the lines of how people can lose an entire hemisphere of their brain and still be conscious. Maybe we'll find that only a tiny golfball-sized portion of the brain is required for consciousness. Maybe something smaller.

For example, the twins obviously have their own personalities, but how much of that overlaps into a single definition of self? It could be that there are always two entities. But my gut feeling is that we'll find that consciousness can merge and divide fairly effortlessly, working like a fractal to retain full memories from both halves. It will be a strange experience (a bit like psychedelics) but within a century will be commonplace.

At what point in development does a child become capable of hearing and interpreting sounds? Can a human hear sounds even if the cells in it cannot? Do ant colonies contain a primitive hearing because they react to vibrations in the air? Does the USA, when it ‘reacts’ to hurricanes?

Not knowing where definitions land is tough, but it's wrong to think that ground reality gives a damn that you find it hard. I don't know precisely where consciousness starts when a human develops. I don't know what point its heart start beating either. None of this has any clear bearing on what the objective truth is, or how it's implemented.

It's not like we don't know anything about consciousness. We know consciousness is not metaphysics, because we can talk about it and affect it with physical actions. We know consciousness is a property of the brain, for similar reasons. The only sensible way of satisfying the prior two points is that consciousness exists at program-level (aka. it's not some opaque oracle hiding in protons), so we know that too.

I think the superorganism perspective is more reasonable than it seems on its face. We manage to digest our food and regulate our endocrine sysyems with almost no conscious intention, and likewise its unlikely our autonomic processes have much knowledge of what we believe ourselves to be thinking about. Most of our cells arent even human. An individual ant doesnt need to grasp what the colony is doing any more than a particular neuron needs to grasp what a person is doing. It seems that the components do have their own awereness, its just much more limited in scope than that of the whole system.

The best case against panpsychism I believe was advanced by complexity theorist Joe Norman: it's not unreasonable to believe that "consciousness" emerges at some levels of a complex system and not at others. No, we can't explain _why_ this is - since we hardly understand complex systems - but we do understand that phenomena exists (emergence) at some scales and not at others. Consciousness could be one of them.

Thought experiment 1

We all start as a single cell. What biological event starts consciousness? Keep in mind you can't be half conscious — that's still conscious.

Thought experiment 2

Look at this random symbol: #. What are you conscious of? Chances are, conscious of things, of objects, of elements, of concepts. Things that have some unity to them. But, things are mental constructs, typically socially shared. So, much of the content of consciousness arrived after birth, once we could learn these mental constructs.

Thought experiment 3

What is more complex: a single neuron (with thousands of mitochondria and other organelles, thousands of synapses) or a worm, with only a few hundred synapses? Similarly, what is more complex, your own body or the company you work for?

For some reason I enjoy trying to share intuitions for idealism. Let me try to do so here.

First, notice that it's impossible to prove which metaphysics (materialism, idealism, solipsism, Last Thursdayism, simulationism...) is correct. Next, notice that the situation is even worse: you can't even assign probabilities to those possibilities without making assumptions about whatever is "outside" reality -- which are by definition untestable.

Now, notice the strong urge to throw your hands up and say "since I can't know, I should just default to the most obvious choice" (which usually ends up being materialism). Avoid this devious trap! It's keeping something hidden.

Next, notice the one thing you can be sure about: the present sheer fact of experiencing something. Notice the mind's attempts to explain it. If you introspect carefully enough, you'll discover that thought isn't the most fundamental capacity you have: "pure consciousness" is. Consciousness takes the form of thoughts -- as well as all sensory perceptions -- and shapes itself into the experience you call "me and my life." You discover that thoughts can no more point at consciousness than a mouse pointer can point at the vibrant pixels it's made of (but boy, do they keep trying). And yet, somehow, consciousness can know itself non-dually and im-mediately.

At some point, the intellectual knowledge that you cannot assign probabilities to metaphysics finally penetrates your core, and there's a mind-shattering "aha" moment that turns your reality inside-out. Various traditions call this "awakening." You do not awaken. "Reality" or "consciousness" awakens to itself, rediscovering its primordial freedom.

Then maybe you go about preaching a philosophy of consciousness-only. Or maybe you just live the best and most loving life you can, knowing that in an impossible-to-communicate sense, we are all the one Love appearing as many.

+1 for Kastrup. I have read two of his books and his reconciling modern physics with spiritualism is in accord with my beliefs.

Personally, I believe that our universe and possibly many universes in the multi-verse is teaming with life in many planets. Also, just my personal belief, but I think their is some universal creative force/consciousness.

Joscha Bach has an interesting take on how to combine idealism with materalism. See for example his 'The Ghost in the Machine' talk at 35C3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3K5UxWRRuY

Yes, I think anything that “sounds like” science but is pretty clearly not measurable or verifiable gets treated with harsh ridicule.

This is really a very different philosophical take on our own self importance in the universe. In western philosophy consciousness has been the pervasive thing that “makes us better” than everything else on the planet. (This is true even biblically if you think about it). The idea that this doesn’t make us special is actually very subversive to a lot of human self identification.

If you look into other traditions than the European one, I think the idea exists already to some extent. But in the circles we run in (and extra so societally) those views are still the minority.

Being told for thousands of years that your special and then having someone come in and say “maybe you’re not.” Is going to elicit a response from those invested in it.

Peronally, my response is not anything more hostile than a tendency for my eyes to roll -- and the reason for that comes from how this argument seems to be using the flexibility of language to avoid the issues.

There is a problem that precedes this essay: 'consciousness' nominally has a meaning of merely being aware of, and responding to, the environment, but this is not the self-aware consciousness that is currently unexplained, and a definition that would include thermostats does not help with that problem. The author compounds this by additionally defining 'experience' as any form of 'undergoing interaction'.

When we talk about consciousness, as in the subjective experience of being, that's ultimately a proxy for "which things can we do really awful stuff to". We reason that for things that are not conscious there is no suffering (since it can't be experienced) and therefore we are free to exploit those things in any way we wish. Lately the trend has been to argue that AI is not, that even though we can create algorithms complicated enough to do the kinds of analysis our own minds do (and in a not-entirely-dissimilar way), they are "just algorithms" and have no experience of suffering for us to concern ourselves with. This is convenient for us, because it allows us to exploit such things without being bothered by ethical reasoning. This is also why many will argue that animals are not conscious, and some will even argue that many humans are not [0].

[0] Which is a perfectly rational statement if you operate from a basis of empiricism. There is no way to measure the consciousness (again, the experience of being) of something, meaning you can only observe your own and everyone else, though similar to you, may as well be an automaton.

Because there are a lot of scientific wackos that are trying to push it to mainstream without any proof, see e.g. PhDs in congnitive neuroscience with focus on art and whole conferences organized around such ideas. It looks like some New Age cult inside science. Whether it's true or not, there is no methodology how to measure it, putting it outside scientific domain. It's on the level of simulation hypothesis. The rationale is that consciousness as a quality exists and is present in universe, so there must be some mechanisms for consciousness to emerge - if it is another layer or whatever on top of universe we have no clue. But most proponents of the theory sound like cultists.

It uses handwavy definitions, it's untestable and makes a lot of assumptions without providing any new predictions.

Because it is obscurantist nonsense that explains nothing.

> The first big leap is considering experience to be a continuum from humans down to inorganic matter. This is stretching the meaning of 'experience'. If I walk on snow, does it experience deformation, or does it just deform?

This is the part where materialism has the burden of proof to explain a mechanism for how, suddenly, snow doesn't experience de-formation.

You get it. You've made the logical link of connections from human down to snow, and you see no mechanism for a sudden loss of the ability to experience.

The rational answer is to say that provided what we know about the universe right now, it seems that there is nothing that does not have the property of experience.

The only other rational answer is solipsism because there's no real evidence that anything other than your self has any experience, but that's no fun and doesn't have any interesting conclusions.

> If I walk on snow, does it experience deformation, or does it just deform?

For me, some of the "making sense" about a position like this is in terms of such dichotomies. The important part is that this description applies equally to all members of the continuum, e.g., "if 'I' like a song, am 'I' experiencing happiness or is 'my' electrochemical clump of 'me' just reacting?"

They certainly don't have a lot of programming experience. I can see them developing something with a bunch of complexity, experiencing a bug, being unable to identify what's causing it (partially due to not having good tools), then declaring it a "intrinsic part of the program"... or "feature". Maybe not that far off after all...

The article finally lost me with "The only way we can find out about the consciousness of others is by asking them [..]". So just add the appropriate response to a sufficiently capable chat-bot and we are done? And if more is required than just a simple yes/no, the same checklist can be used to build something artificial. But since consciousness is one of the good old "you know it when you see it", we will likely shift the goal post pretty hard as AI development progresses, and mostly use the term to exclude what we achieved so far. Kind of like we stop calling something AI once we achieved the a task and use a more technical term... e.g. the many CNN's in a Tesla. Hope I get to experience much of that in my lifetime.

If you'd like to hear someone who disagrees with Goff discussing the idea, I'd highly recommend his podcast with Sean Carroll:

https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2019/11/04/71-p...

A somewhat similar discussion is here:

https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2020/01/06/78-d...

> The first big leap is considering experience to be a continuum from humans down to inorganic matter.

Why is that a leap, while considering it to be discontinuous is not?

If I walk on snow, do I experience walking, or do I just walk? What is experience?

If we explain experience in a way that its reactions happening in my body, maybe biochemical reactions, that could even translate into thoughts in my head, I could say that in a lower level the snow also experience reactions, physical reactions. A snowflake don't have a body to experience like we do, but it does experience something, because if not, it would not even deform.

> So it is conscious but we know where it comes from - it comes from the computational power and interactions with the world it can do.

How little computational ability is required to define something as conscious? Even a brick reacts to stimuli, albeit in the same completely predictable (to our high-powered brains) way that a simple robot does.

>"There's no qualities in the universe, just quantities and we arbitrarily assign labels (qualities) to them."

I understand your standpoint. I feel pretty frustrated with these questions too - especially when people throw large assumptions around like panpsychism. However, I gotta disagree with the idea notion that no qualities exist in the universe. Afterall, isn't every single thing a part of the universe, including thoughts, feelings, and experience?

Here is a thought experiement:

Think about experiencing pain and what it feels like to you. Really try to simulate it in your thoughts. Probably sucks. Now think about happiness and what that feels like to you. Probably doesn't suck as much. Without watching a scan of your brain, and without collecting any sort of scientific data about your nervous system, you were most likely able to discern the difference between those two feelings just now. You didn't do this by any type of measurement of quantity, just by quality of experience (qualia).

So I would argue that either quality definitely exists, or everyone reading this just experienced something that is extra-universal, which in my opinion is just as fantastic and assumptive as panpsychism.

Also, I am not a theoretical physicist nor do I have half of a firm understanding of even classical physics, but apparently there has been advances in theoretical physics to include consciousness into the same theory as quantum and classical physics. Might be interesting for some readers to check out - The Causal Theory of Views: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338544509_The_Causa...

> You cannot experimentally decide if atoms experience anything, the fact that they do or don't doesn't change any prediction for how they behave over time. It's meaningless, like wondering if magic exists but is actively hiding from us. Paranoia is that way.

This has so much potential to become a semantic death trap - but let me ask if you think even human experience could be experimentally tested? If you put me in a room, what could you do to see whether or not I'm "having an experience"? Would the mere act of placing me there be an "experience" or would it be a false positive? What does "non-experience" even mean? I don't see it as counterintuitive to suggest that normally inanimate things like rocks can have experiences - though their experiences are fundamentally different than ours. For instance, we will never be smelted, turned into concrete, etc. and rocks don't have memory or feeling apparatus like we do.. but they do "experience" reality on a very simple level.

You should look into the "Chinese room" thought experiment [0], this line of thinking has been explored pretty thoroughly by people taking some position relative to that.

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/

I think you are simplifying the concept of consciousness a bit too much and are too hard in the paint for a very un-nuanced interpretation of behavioralism.

Your position would be better described as consciousness is an illusion or consciousness does not exist. It has compelling elements but I find it a hard sell.

But it will become a productive question when/if machines start becoming complex enough to be considered "intelligent." Does a machine deserve political rights? Some would say that yes, if it has consciousness. But then what do we mean by consciousness? It's a tricky question and the answer has serious implications in ethics.

Labels have consequences in social and political realms, even if they don't necessarily have them in physical science ones.

Consciousness may be that thing that shows the limits of scientific experimentation.

not to mention the simplest one celled animals do exhibit thinking problem solving functions despite not having neurons

We already know atoms in aggregate experience something. That's settled. If you want to argue that individual atoms are incapable of feeling, then you need to explain how the interaction of atoms brings something distinctly non-physical into being. The ironic thing is your position is actually the one that requires additional evidence, while the position you're arguing against is well supported.

How do you define an illusion without first positing a being that can experience (hence conscious) an illusion?

What does it mean that consciousness is a 'lie our brain tells us', who are we? Are you assuming some form of cartesian dualism, or perhaps you are making a sort of homunculus argument?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homunculus_argument

Sorry, but this barely scratches the surface.

The key problem of consciousness is not what we have an experience of (eg. "you're a real thing that thinks and feels"). It's the fact that it is possible to have any experience at all.

Yes, it seems quite likely that a great deal of what we are conscious of is an "illusion" created in our brains, albeit some rather handy illusions. But that doesn't get even one step closer to the core philosophical problem of how we (or anything else) is able to experience anything at all (including the illusion of being a real thing that thinks and feels)

You seem to be misunderstanding the question of consciousness. It's not about how you observe others to appear conscious, but about how you yourself observe your own consciousness.

> It's a lie our brain tells us [...]

Who is "us"? Or, to be more precise, if your brain tells you that you're experiencing pain, than what is "you", and what is "experiencing"? That's the question of consciousness.

This is not something we know how to observe and judge in others, you can only observe it in yourself (and draw conclusions about other people by analogy, i.e., due to similarity between our physical brain structures). For example, is the following Python script

    print("I am conscious.")

any more conscious than this one?

    print("I am not conscious.")

You'll probably say that they're both not conscious, although there is no hard evidence either way. And that's because we don't know how to reliably observe consciousness.

Well I think the tricky thing about consciousness is that it can’t be an illusion. There is no doubt that you and I have the subjective experience of consciousness. Whether it is an illusion or not doesn’t really matter, you are just making a judgement about the legitimacy of the process which leads to consciousness.

I think what you are getting at is the zombie concept. This is where we construct a being which has sensory inputs and actions, and behaves like a human, but isn’t actually conscious. Distinguishing zombies from real consciousness is supposed to highlight the difficulty in detecting or measuring consciousness. But, by definition the zombie doesn’t have any subjective experience. As soon as you introduce that, you are really saying the zombie is conscious.

As for using consciousness to decide if suffering has moral significance, well yeah that is an interesting idea. One concern is that if we can’t understand or detect consciousness, then we may create conscious artificial life which experiences unimaginable suffering, without even realising it. I don’t think we can say that the experiences of an AI will always lack moral significance.

You are not alone but is a gross oversimplification that of course doesn't explain a LOT of phenomenon.

Check this 9min David Chalmers interview about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK1Yo6VbRoo&feature=emb_titl...

I think the same thing; people are overthinking this maybe because somehow we need to be special (in the absence of aliens).

Interesting article though; we won’t know until we understand/recreate it and if we never do, we won’t know.

The position you describe is known as "eliminative materialism": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliminative_materialism

I find this position absurd for the following reason:

> The illusion of consciousness is obviously beneficial.

Yes, but who experiences this illusion? This explanation begs the question.

It's not a lie lol our pain and the pain of others is important and worth caring about. If it's not, then what is? Nothing.. so far as I can see.

If that's a lie then you're going to have to define what it means to lie before I would acknowledge a lie is any different from the truth.

How can an illusory consciousness be conscious of the illusion of consciousness?

> If I'm correct, then an illusion of consciousness makes complete evolutionary sense.

If you are correct, then actual consciousness would make sense as well, wouldn't it?

The list of guests on that podcast is just astonishing. From Thorne to Grimes, MacFarlane to Greene, from wine to robot abuse. Never fails to impress.

> Panpsychism seems like a bandaid to solve the hard problem of consciousness

It doesn't even do that, it just pushes it down the stack.

If I ask, why is the sky blue, I don't want to hear "Because it's made of blue stuff."

Not only is it wrong, it doesn't have any explanatory power at all. Ultimately if you want to understand why something has a certain property, you want to know how it arises from the emergent behavior of something more fundamental. A hurricane isn't made of hurricane bits, and brains aren't made of consciousness particles.

Am really pleased you name dropped "advaita vedanta" (literally translated from Sanskrit as "non-secondness"). From the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on advaita vedanta:

Brahman—the ultimate, transcendent and immanent God of the latter Vedas—appears as the world because of its creative energy (māyā). The world has no separate existence apart from Brahman. The experiencing self (jīva) and the transcendental self of the Universe (ātman) are in reality identical (both are Brahman), though the individual self seems different as space within a container seems different from space as such. These cardinal doctrines are represented in the anonymous verse “brahma satyam jagan mithya; jīvo brahmaiva na aparah” (Brahman is alone True, and this world of plurality is an error; the individual self is not different from Brahman). Plurality is experienced because of error in judgments (mithya) and ignorance (avidya). Knowledge of Brahman removes these errors and causes liberation from the cycle of transmigration and worldly bondage.

Modern indian philosophy has hitherto been focused on problems specific to the nation-state: modernity, integral yoga, etc. But it will be interesting to see how it grapples with new discoveries in neuroscience.

The references in classical indian literature I really admire always refer to "destroying illusion (maya)". Learning how to remove false cognition from pure sense perception. And seeing things with the vision of Brahman ;)

> But clearly this property isn’t simply additive: panpsychists don’t argue that a Solar System-sized collection of ping-pong balls has more conscious experience than a human being

I think the main difficulty of this argument is that consciousness can only be experienced by the experiencer (mediation/drug-induced experiences aside). Therefore how can you tell how conscious the Solar System, a horse, mouse, atom, etc. is if you can't communicate with them to ask?

Consider the following: your consciousness, that experience you have of being, the one that --in the minds of many-- separates you from a computer programmed to behave like you, cannot exist under your model because it cannot be tested for. Consider also that this statement is ridiculous, because you clearly do have an experience of being. What does this tell us?

Empiricism and the scientific method are a philosophy for modelling reality, and they've undoubtedly done a bang up job of progressing human understanding, but that model is also incomplete. Think of it like Newtonian gravitation, another undoubtedly very useful model that, it turns out, is also incomplete.

> I would almost argue that it doesn't make sense to talk about something being true or untrue if it cannot be tested nor used to make any predictions.

The theory can’t be tested by experiment, but I do think it can be critiqued in terms of internal logical consistency. In that regard, a well structured theory of consciousness could have powerful structure, and much like abstract mathematics lead to practical results.

> There is no way to observe that the world would behave differently whether or not the theory is true. If that's so, I can't think what point there is discussing it, except as a mental exercise.

This is a very materialistic view of the world. By this measure we shouldn’t talk about religious ideas or discuss the (non-monetary) value of art. I have great respect for science, but I think there are things worth discussing that fall outside of science.

I think philosophy has to find gaps in what science can do in order to justify its existence. Some things are untestable -- what are we supposed to do with those things? There are qualitative and normative problems that science can't help us with.

I generally agree with you though -- we'd be better off if we just focused more on science, and describing things accurately, instead of just coming up with wild ass ideas. But it still is good to acknowledge and be aware of known limitations with that approach.

Even if two theories make the exact same predictions, believing or giving more attention to one or the other can change how the brain operates, making it more or less efficient at some tasks and eliciting different emotions.

For example, the interpretation of natural numbers as sets in set theory and as strings of decimal digits is equivalent and gives the same results, however for most people seeing numbers as naturally being strings of decimal digits is likely to make them faster at doing arithmetic and making decisions based on numbers.

Likewise, seeing other people as conscious or unconscious results in the same predictions about their behavior, but seeing them as conscious might make most people more efficient at cooperation with other people.

In this case, seeing all matter as conscious might make someone feel less special, and thus have less attachment to their identity and spend less effort acting in a way that preserves it.

Just because the observable world is testable doesn't mean that subjectivity doesn't hold any value.

>Even the theory's advocate acknowledges in this interview that it's untestable. There is no way to observe that the world would behave differently whether or not the theory is true.

Mathematics is also "untestable" in the same way. You can't observe that the world would behave differently whether or not 2=2 or 1=2. Does this make mathematics practically useless, except as a form of entertainment?

Furthermore, why is entertainment spoken of as a lower purpose than "practical uses"? I very much doubt you'd want to live in a world without such "entertainment".

The consciousness itself (not the theory) is in the root of what we perceive and exercising it effectively broads our perception of reality which is the single most practical thing one can do because everything else we do is limited by our perception.

I believe there can be better and worse explanation, even if they predict the same. I think interpretations of quantum mechanics are of this kind.

Consciousness is empirical, since you can talk about it. Therefore if panpsychism is not empirical, it's wrong.

> that means it can't affect anything

it can still affect how we interact with the world

How do you define "practical use?"

> But can't we measure brain waves with CAT scans? Isn't there research going on now into observing brain patterns and actually figuring out what the subject is thinking about in real time?

But what does that have to do with consciousness (the experience of being)? All it shows is that our brains work the same way machines do, which isn't really a surprise. We can use a logic probe on machines and figure out how they work too. There is no way to determine if something experiences the world around it or "merely" is a product of a complex mechanism of reactions and interactions. That's what is meant by consciousness being unobservable.

> IMO its worth a serious look from biochemistry point of view.

I'm not a scientist, and certainly not a quantum physicist. But from what I understand, the main argument against this idea (that is, quantum effects within neurons - or some other biological quantum effect system) is the fact that as far as we know, such quantum effects cannot occur at any temperature near "average human body temperature".

If such could be demonstrated, it would upend a massive amount of knowledge in and around QM/QP.

But then again, dual-slit experiment? Maybe something is there? Again - far outside my understanding and knowledge, and likely is completely wrong, etc.

It might make a good science-fiction plot for a novel or something, though...

What was genocide if the idiots went to live in computer 'heaven' with catgirl maids and whatever other narcissistic fantasies they cooked up?

You're saying like we build a plane to go to mars and then once in space the computer discovers it needs air to move and now we're fucked... why does your first posit on magic petaflops not translate into effective reading of the brain and how it works?

Panpsychism isn't really supported by IIT, at least not any version of panspychism that is resurging. IIT says the organization determines the level of consciousness. Panpsychism has no theory for how organization increases or combines conscious properties of the individual conscious units of matter.

I am too.

Even just publishing it in their forum is destructive for science.

He talks about Dust giving everything consciousness, but I don't recall that he ever really goes into the details of what that means.

Here is an interesting opinion of an AI researcher on consciousness. He basically claims that it is inevitable for an agent that can not store all information that it encounters and therefore needs to compress it. One of the most important things that needs to be represented is the agent itself, leading to self-symbols as he calls them. Correct me please if I summarized the comment incorrectly.

https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/2xcyrl/i_a...

You might be interested in philosophical zombies by the way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

I think it's more about the approach taken for researching the hard problem of consciousness (what you basically pointed out; what explains the phenomenon of subjective experience for conscious entities?).

Most researchers are doing exactly what you said, looking at it from the angle of "what arrangement of matter" gives rise to consciousness?. This model follows our intuitions and should definitely be explored; I don't think anyone is arguing the contrary.

But there are others, like the cognitive psychologist Donald D. Hoffman, who are doing research from the complete opposite side of this problem: what if consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe? He explains this far better than I can (pre-caffeinated) in his book The Case Against Reality[1], which I'd recommend you read if you're interested in this topic (he's also done quite a few interviews which can be found on youtube et al[2]).

Perhaps similar to you, I (a materialist) used to have what I can only call a "gut reaction" to this idea - panpsychism just seemed like "new age bullshit" that was impossibly wrong. But I'm becoming more open, and honestly the science being done is really fascinating[3].

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Case-Against-Reality-Evolution-Truth/... [2] https://youtu.be/4HFFr0-ybg0 [3] http://cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/Chapter17Hoffman.pdf

Passing a bong around?

This is a trite dismissal of a genuinely interesting attempt to get to grips with what the nature of consciousness might be.

It would be more convincing if you offered intelligent counters to the arguments of panpsychism rather than silly clichés intended to derail discussion.

> This is the exact wrong direction we should take if we want to have any hope of understanding consciousness.

Can you expand on what direction that is and why exactly it's wrong? I didn't see bongs mentioned in the article.

> We should ask: is it really true that all humans are conscious, or is there something specific that triggers consciousness?

How can that question possibly be answered without knowing what consciousness is?

> If we refuse to even question these things, then of course we'll never come up with any answer.

I didn't see this article as refusing to question those things. Very much the opposite. It's questioning the consciousness of everything, not just assuming that nothing is conscious because, well, you don't know...

Or we could pass the bong around and say that Dust is responsible.

I think this is a situation where Newton's Flaming Laser Sword comes into play. The whole point of a p-zombie as a thought experiment is that they are outwardly indistinguishable from normal conscious humans.

Spoken like the stereotypical materialist.

Panpsychism is often put forth as a solution to the dualism/physicalism problem. That is...sort of the entire point. To call it obfuscated dualism is to completely misunderstand the idea, so much so that I have a hard time believing you've read any material on the topic.

This is covered in the introductory paragraph of the SEP article:

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

> for the simple reason that it gives no way to explain why humans act on their conscious experience and have it modelled internally as a conscious experience.

The theory doesn't purport to explain internal models nor awareness in any sense that we're used to it. That is a separate question. If you are looking for those answers, they will be found in how the machination of "conscious" behavior accumulates sufficient complexity to look like directed actions from the outside.

Why such a quick dismissal? We have virtually zero evidence one way or the other. Calling consciousness an “emergent property” is a cop-out answer. What, materially, is that property, what physical laws explain it, and by what mechanism does it emerge from mere electrical impulses?

How functional must a brain be? We know that we can remove at least half of a human brain and still have a somewhat functional person. Where is the line drawn?

Why? Why does evolution have something to do with consciousness?