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.
It's almost as if we've always known the true nature of our consciousness, we just keep overlooking it :)
Having limited time and not being special (as in connected inextricably to everything else but being not unique or important), really changes ethical considerations, many of which are the basis of our society. A lot of our human selfishness is natural and ingrained, survival of the fittest is fairly ugly. So we justify ourselves in various ways.
But once you know it’s hard to unknow, so there’s a lot to feel empty about in the quiet moments when you remember.
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'.
By this do you mean we've explained how "what is it like to be a bat?" works? (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F)
If so, can you point me toward that explanation?
1a: the quality or state of being aware especially of something within oneself. (my emphasis.)
If you regard 'especially' to indicate that the emphasized clause is optional (edit: or maybe even if not), you could arguably say (and people do) that anything alive fits this definition, as do even things like thermostats. This, however, is not the consciousness that the science and philosophy of mind is concerned with: it is specifically concerned with the sort of consciousness that we exhibit, which is aware that it is an agent in the world, aware that it has this awareness, and aware that other people are also aware in this sense.
Update: I may have misunderstood your question. The nature of consciousness in other animals is also an open issue and is being studied. It would be very odd indeed if there was nothing like it in any other species, but, at the same time, no other living species on earth has it to the extent we do. I don't think these observations justify the extremely broad definitions of panpsychism, and I do not think panpsychism helps with studying these animals any more that it helps with humans.
Nagel's point is, I think, rather tangential - he is arguing that we probably will never know what it is like to be a bat, as it is likely too far from any experience we could have. I think he is probably right, and again, panpsychism will not change that.
If taken to its logical ends, constructs like the crayon box and human fucking empathy are off the table too - I cannot and do not have any idea of who or what you are being, therefore I cannot comprehend consciousness? What?
[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.
Right - that's the whole game this author is playing. One question that is so easily answered if you spend time observing is whether or not YOU are conscious. That is the only thing you can ever be sure of. Because you feel conscious. You feel like something is happening. You might be a brain in a vat and everyone else is an automaton. But you definitely know that you are experiencing something.
I think there will never be a proof of consciousness that will satisfy the standards set by scientific experimentation.
... it is a far cry from the early scientists who considered Nature as an intelligence one has to trick or seduce into giving up its secrets through the scientific method. That to hold an objective or skeptical stance was to pretend that there is such a thing as absolute objectivity.
These days, the modern stance is the default, not the radical stance.
A lot of experiments have been done about consciousness through meditation, psychedelics, etc.
If not, then any discussion about consciousness is "handwavy" and "untestable."
Tests about your own consciousness are interesting, but ultimately can't answer anything about consciousness in general, because they are by definition n=1, since you can't know if my results are actually the result of consciousness.
But I don't think this makes discussions about consciousness useless. If you tell me something about your consciousness I can check if it fits my experience, and you can test something I say for yourself.
What this means is that there might not be an absolute truth about this, only relative truths.
But then, this applies to anything, as no experience can happen outside of consciousness, so all of science is the same way.