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> 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.

> 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.

Right. In this case, the goal would be to "increase" the consciousness, rather than create it.

> 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.

Essentially, yes. I meant that the model of panpsychism might serve as a useful as a blueprint to create artificial minds from the accumulation of low-level components, even if it isn't necessarily useful as a scientific model of the universe.

> 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.

> 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.

How do you know that your experimentation that reveals this disconnect isn't subject to the same problem?

I'm not sure how to word it artfully, but I mean the question sincerely: how do we avoid invoking turtles-all-the-down?

To abuse that analogy, it's turtles all the way down until eventually it's not turtles but the border where that transition happens is blurry because "Turtle" is just an artificial human created category. Like the "chicken and the egg" paradox, reality is most likely that things change a little with each step until the category "chicken" eventually doesn't apply.

I do think that, like with our perception of color, there are likely fairly concrete inaccuracies in our memories of our experience of consciousness that we might be able to measure that might improve our understanding of the underlying phenomenon with fully explaining it.

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

Word. I don't have much more to add to that other than yes. I think that humans are delusional in their understanding of how advanced we are as a conscious form of life. We are not that much different from simple machines.

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.

If consciousness, or any phenomenon that effects our physical world in a way we can perceive, originated from some mechanism that takes place on a sub-plank scale, then I think that it would be conceivable for some super advanced machinery to be able to effect or even replicate said phenomenon. Just not with our current level of technology

Well, semantics are stretching at that level a bit because while at sub-Plank it would still be technique/technology involved, I'm not 100% sure it can be called machinery. I don't discard that it could be machinery at our newtonian scale that creates an environment where that ultra-micro thing happens tho.