Is Consciousness Everywhere?
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
I call bullshit. Could someone please explain what I'm missing?
Oh, and as you might imagine, there was a pretty considerable amount of material that existed in both of those classes.
For Scott Aaronson's take on "Integrated Information Theory": https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799
Human suffering presumably has some sort of limit based purely on our physical makeup. Suppose though the very concept of subjective suffering could be modeled in some way. Is there any law in the universe that says there is a limit to suffering, pain (or pleasure)?
Could an investigator of the future test out an algorithm on a conscious entity modeled in software, just to see what the mathematical limit of pain is? Maybe that's what Hell is...
The existence of "real papers with math behind thest claims" is sort of irrelevant. IIT is being proposed as a scientific theory, and the author of TFA claims that IIT is testable, but he has not said anything about actual testing. I cannot judge the math, and I doubt that I could judge a scientific paper describing a test. I'm simply asking: Is there any actualy testing, completed or in progress? TFA did not make such a claim.
https://youtu.be/LGd8p-GSLgY?t=3512
This is a fairly old talk and if you do a bit more digging I think he has other talks with more experiments.
Once you actually open your mind to this idea, you will begin to see it everywhere, and with practice be able to connect, communicate, and derive mutual benefit. It,s up to you to take the first step, though.
Of course, you can also choose to remain in the safe comfort of materialism. I know from experience that it can be a very lonely place. I wish you a happy journey, wherever it may lead.
sometimes they just end up ignored and/or laughed at
However, here's an experimental method you may find helpful in your quest for knowledge: Find a creature, any creature, who appears in your life somehow... a cat, a dog, a worm, a rat, an insect, anyone you notice.
Rack your brain as hard as you can until you begin to see some semblance of feelings and desires in them, as well as a way in which you can help them achieve it. Now, go ahead and do that thing, and do your best to ensure that it works out.
When you're done, start paying attention to what happens to you in your daily course of existence. If you're into mindfulness meditation, here is where you apply that.
If you like, please return here and report your results, I'd love to hear from you! If the thread is already closed, you can find a way to contact me via my profile.
My only point is that in the popular articles I've seen on consciousness, that discuss IIT, I have not, over many years, seen any description of a test of the theory, or even a statement of how it could be tested.
Say, for instance, that what IIT measures isn't consciousness but memory. It tells you that when you take general anesthetic, the IIT measure in the brain decreases. But it's hypothetically speaking possible that when you get anesthesized, you're still aware and feel everything that's happening to you (in the sense of having qualia), only that it never gets recorded to memory.
The result is the same: it appears, in retrospect, that you lost consciousness. But you can't prove that you actually did, only that your memory of the past behaves as if you did.
This seems fundamental, unless we through some future discovery can nail down what consciousness is. The consciousness-status of past me is just as opaque as that of other people.
Each of our experiences are composed of the experiences of (billions?) of other people. We aren't islands.
And do neurons know about us? Well, they only know what they know. I think what they know could potentially be an empirical question. Some neurons are far more complex and connected than others.
All a single neuron does is pass a signal to the synaptic cleft in response to a chemical or electrical signal at the other end. It's a simple subunit of a larger system.
Saying a single neuron is more complex than a worm is like saying a cat6 ethernet cable is more complex than a blast furnace.
Neurons can have millions of mitochondria [1], which they dynamically move about the cell. Neurons are like amoeba with dozens of pseudopods when young. Amoeba are more complicated than worms, in terms of degrees of freedom, no?
Check this video of fetal neurons movin' about. So cute! https://youtu.be/hb7tjqhfDus
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncir.2016.0002...
Inner life of a cell: https://youtu.be/wJyUtbn0O5Y
Indeed, I’ve always suspected your observation may be the best definition of ‘life’ we currently have; namely, living systems are composed of parts that are more complex than the whole.
It’s a hard concept to articulate.
But, as you obviously know, the principle is obvious.. it doesn’t stop with the neuron; I would suspect the neurons membrane or its organelles are more ‘complex’ than the neuron itself.
By non-materialist I mean I do not see matter as distinct from information. I believe the only thing that exists is information. What is information? It is structure and meaning and pattern and potential. Information is entwined with entropy.
Meanwhile, atoms have been working without as much as a fucking smoke break for literally billions of years! >_<
I don't claim to be conscious. I am alive and awake and thinking and sensing, etc.
>Consciousness does absolutely objectively exist, or at least I can say it does for me.
This sentence appears to confuse subjective experience with objective reality.
>That its existence is not objectively measurable doesn't mean it doesn't exist
If we can think of something that is not objectively measurable what suggests that it exists objectively as opposed to it being a subjective opinion?
Can you define consciousness without invoking subjective conscious experience? You agree there is not evidence of objective existence and yet you say it objectively exists because you subjectively feel it does. Is this not self-contradictory?
Are you claiming that subjective opinions do not exist, despite your own observations of your own subjective opinons?
Also, imagine you live in a box with a yellow ball. And you can speak to other people outside your box. They tell you they also live in a box with a yellow ball. You will never have proof that they actually have yellow balls in their boxes. And they will never have proof that you actually have a yellow ball in your box.
Would you say that yellow balls are merely a subjective opinion, and don't exist?
That does not mean its existence is realised or useful. Is it useful (consequential) and consistent that yellow balls exist? If yes, then they do. If no, then they don't.
No, I'm saying it need not be objectively measurable to be real. This is what I mean by empiricism being an incomplete philosophy.
>If we can think of something that is not objectively measurable what suggests that it exists objectively as opposed to it being a subjective opinion?
That you prefer chocolate ice cream isn't objective. But that you have a preference for chocolate ice cream is objective. The content of the conscious percept isn't necessarily real, but the fact that you are having what we call a 'conscious percept' certainly is real. Just because it is happening in your head, why should it not be real?
Actually as far as I understand we know that telepathy does not work, and even more so with psychokinesis. Did you read the book, can you point me to the scientific evidence of psychokinesis?
as a hacker, you should have little difficulty finding these and reviewing them.
unfortunately, i have not the time or motivation to be your personal research assistant.
To me it seems that materialism (or physicalism or any monism) inevitably leads to panpsychism. If there's only one kind of substance, it's either conscious or it's not, so everything has consciousness or nothing does. Panpsychists go with the former, probably because they think they are conscious, material beings.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/review/R2VIDRICPX3ROL/ref=cm_cr_srp_d...
why did you choose to post that particular review out of all the others? why not, for example, this one?
"Consider the possibly that classical physics is not only wrong but way wrong." "A wild ride through the data supporting psi. I was for many years a reductionist like Michael Shermer. However, after reading more and books like this, my mind has accepted the reality that we know very little about where we came from and what really drives our human..."
I'm skeptical of this claim in general, there's a lot of research that either isn't reliable, biased or gets twisted to support a claim. Then this i think becomes pop science, low quality sounds realistic to me kind of things. When you have to emphasize "based on science" my bs sensor goes off.
Idk if anyone else feels that way, I feel like have to approach a lot claims skeptically in fields I don't know enough about.
i found it not only convincing, but also to have practical applications which are not difficult to arrive at with a little thinking.
if you are a well-intentioned tinkerer and hacker not limiting yourself to digital devices with a manual, you may find it intriguing.
1. [Word A] means [Concept X] to most people.
2. [Concept X] doesn't apply to [Item K], but [Concept Y] does.
3. By creating a new definition, finding an obscure definition, or twisting a current definition I can argue that [Word A] technically can mean [Concept Y], and then apply the term to [Item K].
4. Now that I'm using [Word A] for [Item K], most people will associate [Item K] with [Concept X].
So when we say "consciousness," most people conjure up some concept about human like thought and communication. That's the reason why most people find the word compelling, and it obviously (almost by definition) doesn't apply to most of the stuff talked about in this article.
When coming across arguments that rely on this type of sleight of hand, I think it's best to ask yourself what the article would actually be saying if the loaded term was replaced by another term or phrase that makes it explicitly clear what the other means. So when the author of this article writes something like this:
> This is utterly frigid, hundreds of degrees colder than any temperature terrestrial organisms can survive. But the fact that the temperature is non-zero implies a corresponding tiny amount of heat in deep space. This of course implies a corresponding tiny amount of experience.
It seems that he's arguing that consciousness is experience and experience is any activity, even at the atomic level. So if we remove the sleight of hand and ask "Is there some level of activity, even sleight activity at the atomic level, everywhere?" The answer might be affirmative (if we're using a loose sense of the word "everywhere"), but it's not a particularly surprising or even interesting question to answer.
To put it in the words of Syndrome: if everything is conscious, nothing is.
I think what you're using as a counter argument is really a foundation of buddhist emptiness or vedanta brahman. i.e. that the percieved duality is an illusion
I'll turn the question around: What aspect of your consciousness is not an experience? What aspect of your experience is not a part of consciousness?
Gp asserted "We don't know how to define life." I put forth a closed definition of life that makes sense. Others may have a less restrictive definition...my definition demonstrated that sufficient conditions exist to define life.
I don't think its just you, there isn't a good scientific definition of consciousness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness#Definitions
Consciousness is impossible to describe. It is neither hot nor cold, it has no size, and it experiences no passage of time as it is always now, eternal. There are no sides to it and no parts. It has no extent. It cannot be pointed to.
It is beyond all possible signification, yet it is the significance of all acts and events and things.
The closest thing you can get to a physical referent for consciousness is to notice that "consciousness" is a synonym for "now". (To spell it out: you have never once in all your life been conscious at a time other than now.)
- - - -
From my POV a very common mistake (TFA makes it, and you seem to as well) is to insist that the contents of consciousness are the thing itself. It's like mistaking the television program for the screen itself. The problem with that mistake is that there's no argument that can counter it. Reality of consciousness is an experiential thing that, once grokked, changes the nature of one's being, not a formula or measurement.
Meditation is focus/defocus from even that.
As beings, humans are mostly preoccupied with the changing phenomena however.
>[Essence of being] is impossible to describe. It is neither hot nor cold, it has no size, and it experiences no passage of time as it is always now, eternal. There are no sides to it and no parts. It has no extent. It cannot be pointed to.
Therefore it is not amenable to scientific or logical study. Study of essence of being is a spiritual quest for the individual and the Universe as a whole.
Maybe some "enlightened" or "adept" can use their insight or gifts but it is not a general technology that can be studied, measured, classified, boxed, etc.
To be sure, there are some neuroscientists who are doing some very interesting and useful work studying things like "What's the least stimulus that causes a noticeable percept?"
And because consciousness is not physical, I can't fathom where it comes from.
Like...I can grasp the idea of abiogenesis [0], the concept that organic molecules started self-replicating through chemical reactions that over millions of years started forming single-celled life that after a couple billion years turned into complex multi-cellular life and evolution has put us into the form we (and all other life) is today.
But this understanding just makes life look like nothing more than a very specific set of chemical and electrical reactions. To a naive external observer, the human brain is essentially nothing more than a highly complex electrical circuit, and yet, it is conscious.
We know what consciousness is, but it is very hard to define, because as you basically said, it is not physical. It exists, but can't be seen or even measured. You can see evidence of it by interacting with other life that appears conscious, but you can't prove it. If you could assemble a brain atom-by-atom, it could appear to be conscious, but would it? You won't know, and won't be able to know.
Even if we created "perfect" AI and put it into a "perfect" artificial body that was indistinguishable from an actual human (I'm imagining the hosts in the Westworld TV series), most people would say it wasn't conscious, but you couldn't prove it either way.
EDIT: In addition, we think about "conscious" decisions, but are your decisions truly made by consciousness? Think about how drugs will chemically affect the brain and can change behaviors. It makes me believe that free will is an illusion. Your consciousness doesn't make decisions, your physical brain does, and your brain can be altered. You're just a few million altered neurons away from an entirely different personality.
We are meat robots. Brains scans have shown that we do not "make decisions". Your brain makes the decision and then a few tens of milliseconds later you have the subjective experience of "I decide". Free will is an illusion. The neuroscientists discovered this but the philosophers and public haven't gotten the memo yet.
The fascinating thing is that the automatic meat robots become sophisticated enough to notice that they are conscious. This should technically be impossible but it does happen.
> I think we should be relatively open to the possibility that there is a good description of consciousness
I agree but what could that possibly be?
The only reason we know subjective awareness exists is that we "have" or "are" it ourselves.
It's not like electricity where we don't (and can't) know what it "is" but we can describe its behavior and effects mathematically with extraordinary precision because we have instruments to measure it.
We have no instruments that can measure subjective awareness, only self-reports.
Now it's often overlooked that you can investigate consciousness by means of your own consciousness. However, the information evolved that way always remains subjective, and so is of no avail to create objective descriptions of consciousness.
Something similar was coming up recently in my meditation practice, where I'd be aware of a vague impulse of a thought or idea arising before it became verbalized. Then I realized that I had had that experience before, when I was a kid and playing music a lot, where I'd notice the sensation of a thought beginning to arise but would put it away before it could get verbalized, since playing music needs a lot of attention and discursive thoughts will certainly make you mess up.
I'm not really trained in Zen, but in reading a book by Katsuki Sekida a while back he referred to thought impulses by varying degrees of 'nen', with the first 'nen' being a thought impulse of pure experience before it is recognized by a second or third degree 'nen'. This sort of felt related to that experience.
I can't think of a way that it could work without invoking the metaphysical.
From https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/incompatibilism-arguments...
"Free will…is the power of agents to be the ultimate creators or originators and sustainers of their own ends or purposes…when we trace the causal or explanatory chains of action back to their sources in the purposes of free agents, these causal chains must come to an end or terminate in the willings (choices, decisions, or efforts) of the agents, which cause or bring about their purposes. (Kane 1996: 4)"
That might be metaphysical, but I don't see any other way free will could operate - that is, if it exists.
His main argument is that we have two causal models to understanding the world, direct physical ones and "agent based". The first is good for figuring out a thrown rock is about to hit you and the agent based models are important for understanding things like a tigers sneaking up on prey.
Wegner proposes that when we apply this agent based model to our own actions we come up with the illusion of a conscious will. This is essentially the same as your post-hoc justification.
This I cannot achieve unless I'm staring at a white computer screen up close.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.0057...
Both articles address the combination problem. However, the one I linked to goes into more detail about it and in fact addresses two separate combination problems:
“The first is the combination of phenomenal experiences, i.e., of qualia. [...] The second problem is the combination of subjects of experiences.”
He used to work at CERN, and was the youngest executive at ASML, till recent when he decided to dedicate himself solely to philosophy. He's not your regular wanna be woo-guru for sure.
I made a doc that introduces Plato and uses a keyword search to show his understanding of "Harmony" as the nature of goodness, pleasure and experience. Comments welcome https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lqXpXgWI5YMBCz1O0gCmrEwz...
His approach, reasoning and explanations have been very appealing to my analytical Mind.
Discussed regularly in this forum.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Also during Tononi's talk a guy walked through the isle and said something along the lines of 'Phi is the answer, Phi is god, Tononi is our savior'
Thoughts on Phi?
"If Phi is measured in complexity you could make a glass window complex and that is conscious."
Doesn't seem very useful to me. A bit like brexit means brexit. I mean machine learning gains from experience of new inputs - does that mean the thing is conscious?
"The Role of DNA in Conscious Systems" by John Grandy: http://publicationslist.org/data/john.grandy/ref-42/The%20Ro...
This I find fascinating — that perhaps a certain soulful software needs to interact with material phenomena in order to create feeling. I don't know that I believe it, but it is a sensible reason to believe that consciousness is not pervasive.
In other words embodyment is a necessity for consciousness. The ability to explore, interact, make experiments, test theories, they all depend on having an able body to move around and a rich environment to explore. A body also brings necessities - the agent needs to work to keep itself alive, and has goals, positive and negative rewards. These are ingredients without which there would be no point for consciousness to exist.
Koch not only writes from a position of possessing great knowledge of the subject but also he does so in a most coherent and lucid manner. Moreovr, he simultaneously conveying his own convictions with ease, eloquence and finesse.
Koch's analysis is certainly the most comprehensive of any short analysis of this subject material I've read, it was also the most understandable and enjoyable.
A recent oral surgery gave this hypothesis pause. I was given Propofol as an anesthetic, and upon awakening had an extremely impactful existential experience. My very consciousness had been extinguished, instantly, as if by a lightswitch, and for 45 minutes there was nothing but oblivion.
If consciousness is inherent to being, then how could it so easily be nullified to the point of oblivion, and then brought back online?
(And, no offense, I get the George Harrison reference, but saying that consciousness "is everything" begs the very question of evaluating panpsychism critically. I'm posting this because it is counter to my own longheld beliefs that consciousness is inherent to being.)
My consciousness did not exist. I had no awareness of the passage of time. There was no observer. No dreams. From my perspective, I teleported from a chair to another room, with an existential discontinuity in between. The only "experiencing" was after my consciousness was brought back online.
I cannot describe it to you sufficiently with words, and you likely cannot understand it sufficiently without ceasing to exist for yourself. Are the dead aware that they are dead? It seems, from my perspective, that for those 45 minutes, my consciousness was extinguished, not unlike that of someone fully dead.
(Not that I have first-hand experience being fully dead, of course! And, in a conversation about panpsychism, I suppose the experience of being a dead body isn't something to discredit as "nothing"!)
https://mattasher.com/2020/07/19/episode-11-tam-hunt-on-cons...
He pitches the idea (which I'm poorly paraphrasing) that there's a relationship between the complexity of matter and the complexity of its aspect as consciousness. Smaller fields of consciousness merge with a common resonance to form larger more complex consciousness. Anesthesia or coma being states where those smaller fields fall out of resonance and the more complex consciousness breaks down.
I personally think that trying to understand "consciousness" should be deferred in favor of trying to understand "common sense", or "how to avoid doing bad stuff in the next few seconds". Once we have a handle on that basic survival mechanism, seen in all mammals, then we might be able to address consciousness. Also, we could build robots able to keep themselves out of trouble. Biggest unsolved AI problem right now. It's the basic reason computers do stupid stuff sometimes.
Trying to understand "consciousness" without the ability to emulate basic common sense results in philosophical tail-chasing. There's a lot of that around.
I got too much of this going through Stanford CS in the mid-1980s. This was during the "expert systems" period, just about when expert systems turned out not to be that useful. The philosophers were still in charge. One exam question was "Does a rock have intention?", which gives a sense of where the faculty was coming from back then.
(The reviewer meant "adduce", not "abduce". "Abduce" is just moving your limbs outward. The muscles that power such movements are called abductors.)
Fundamentally, we need to understand why we have inner subjective experiences that feel the way they do. It sometimes keeps me awake at night troubling over how we could even begin to cast an explanation for this intimately subjective phenomenon in the objective language of mathematics and physics.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism
As an aside to all the comments regarding a definition and defining consciousness:
It's possible for things to not be reducible to objective language constructs. The nature of subjectivity is that it can't be defined. I fear (at least in science contexts) we will chase our tails forever!
https://mattasher.com/2020/07/19/episode-11-tam-hunt-on-cons...
If my cells are in conflict or disagreement about what action to take (which I presume they often are), my consciousness resolves this by taking a decision.
As such, I find it likely that this sense and experience of consciousness is shared by all, or almost all, multi-cellular organisms on the same evolutionary tree of life.
Also from a how the brain works point of view you have billions of neurons recognising things in parallel and the data seems to narrow down from that to awareness of a small number of things which you can logically reason about. I'd imagine a lot of the conscious experience comes from that - the neural net highlights as it were.
Like if you're in the woods your pattern recogniser bits may be going there's a leaf there, there's a twig there, there's a bear attacking, there's some moss on the tree etc. and then the bear bit will get highlighted so you can think 'ah pepper spray' or what have you. The highlights being what we experience as consciousness.
It implies you get human like consciousness from that kind of mechanism so yes for a mouse, no for a carrot.
It also differentiates stuff going on in your brain that you are aware of and respond to but are not consciously aware of to that which you are. Say you are being chased by the bear and run. The logistics of running - path dips 2cm, raise left leg 5cm... you will not be consciously aware of because the highlights and logical reasoning bit will be busy with 'shit -there's bear what next?' type issues.
https://smile.amazon.com/Consciousness-Brain-Deciphering-Cod...
The confusion people experience around consciousness amounts to a language problem. We want nouns to refer to things, but nouns can equally refer to activities. What happens to your consciousness when you die? What happens to your breathing when you die? What happens to the speed when the car stops? If consciousness is an activity, then it can come and go, like sleeping can subside and be replaced by eating. The sleeping hasn't gone anywhere, there's nothing to go and nowhere for it to go to.
However human mind is something entirely different: it's a self-conscious something built on top of "raw consciousness".
There would be no point. Consciousness has a purpose related to replication, it's not just a background field.
I would describe consciousness as the ability for an information processing system to model the world around it, and importantly, said information processing system's place in it.
As I sit here, my model of the world around me is humming along nicely. I believe I am quite conscious. My dog is sitting here beside me (awake) seems to be experiencing consciousness. My other sleeping dog is not conscious - perhaps it is dreaming, but that's not really modelling the world around it. And as we move down the scale, I become less and less convinced that various creatures are conscious. Birds? Sure. Fish? Maybe. Ants? Hmm. Bacteria? No.
At the lowest level, creatures that simply respond to stimuli are not conscious. But there's a lot of wiggle room between a bacterium and me. Right before I wake up in the morning, my model isn't really working. I would say at that point I'm not conscious. But within a few seconds, the model is running and I understand my place in it. That isn't an on/off situation. It's a gradient that I quickly pass through; becoming ever more conscious along the way.
And every night (or if I get a deteriorating neuronal disease and my neurons start to die off), the whole thing plays in reverse. My consciousness dwindles down to nothingness.
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2019/11/04/71-p...
Mindscape is the absolute best science, philosophy and culture podcast I've found so far.
We treat everything as an object, even mental thoughts and experiences. When we think of awareness, we objectify that awareness using one of the sense experience. But consciousness transcends awareness and in consciousness exits awareness. Consciousness is not an object of experience and that is why it is difficult to understand.
I have the feeling of experiencing things. Is it not possible that such a phenomenon can be produced within a machine?
When I try to answer this question, after coding for decades I can’t tell you how this phenomenon can be possible within a Turing machine.
So it seems obvious to me that (a) brains must be machines and (b) a machine cannot be conscious and so I conclude that (c) I don’t know what I’m talking about.
Waking \
Dreaming > Turiya ≝ pure consciousness illuminating these
Deep dreamless sleep /
And you can read the original text here: https://universaltheosophy.com/sacred-texts/mandukya-upanish...
1: Consciousness is everywhere and all.
Or
2: Consciousness is nowhere.
Who is it that is asking the question?
The answer is purely existential.
The question is childish!
If you think free will exists, listen to Sam Harris's 1 hour series of audio on the topic. It will change your mind.
I wish we taught introspection and self-examination in public schools.
The chance of being and ant or a human is the same....
Mere phenomenal consciousness is anywhere _in living creatures_ so that even a bacterium can be said to be conscious (it reacts to light sources, for example, and is able to detect nutrients).
I like how you clearly define these differences. But tow do you know other creatures are not meta-conscious?
Long answer: there is a plausible argument that consciousness might be a gradient. Certain creatures might express some level of meta consciousness, yet still far from what humans can do. For instance, elephants, primates or even just a dog might express some sort of empathy or more subtle mental states that do not equate with the experience itself, which would be mere phenomenal consciousness, but they do not appear to articulate to themselves those mental states and do anything more than simple reactions with those states.
Ultimately the claim comes from empirical observations: there's an immense evolutionary gap between humans and everything else, so that we can plausibly claim that we are the only fully meta-conscious creatures.
And maybe one aspect of human consciousness is ants thinking, "hmm what are these large things that seem to leave sugary refuse in their wake?"
Or stated a bit fancier - the p-value of the null "consciousness is everywhere" is astronomically small, given this observation of me ending up as a human.
Ants might be conscious but that doesn't mean that they count as anthropic observers.
The probability that you are someone who is capable of asking the question you've asked is 1.
The chances that the matter you're made of ended up making you is astronomically small compared to it just being random space dust or something. And yet it happened.
I think it's just selection bias.
The matter I am made of is nothing special - everything has same kind of matter so I am bound to have some of it. But the consciousness I have is very special - top shelf in all of biology.
Say bacteria are conscious. Here is how special this is: the number of bacteria on earth is estimated to be "five million trillion trillion". And there are ~7 billion humans. So the chance that I randomly end up as human, instead of bacteria is ~ 0.0000000000000000000001. And that is disregarding all other creatures.
Try to see it from this perspective; your experience as an individual (soul) is a feature of the structure we call Homo sapiens. It's a characteristic of this species' brain structure, in the same way that the colors of a flower are characteristic of its phenotype.
It would be silly to ask, "What are the chances that that shade of yellow ended up on that particular daffodil?"
The notion of "you" being in a "body" is extremely difficult to shake. Even if it's intellectually approachable, understanding it intuitively is something else entirely, though certainly attainable through sustained meditative practice or a hearty dose of psychedelics.
The fact that I am "seated" in a human body is an argument for only humans having this feature or phenotype called consciousness, and against the "consciousness is everywhere".
But this is not what is happening. What is happening is more like you finding three tickets under your rug in the morning, checking the numbers and finding out that you won jackpots in all three, and then choosing to believe that they are winner tickets by chance (believing in consciousness is everywhere) as opposed to someone planting them there (only humans are conscious or some other similar explanation).
The key difference between the two is that in the second case there are no multiple possibilities - it's about one person - you, you either win or loose, so we cannot select "winners" after the fact in this case.
What you're saying is that panpsychism implies a lower probability of you ending up as you, because you may have ended up as a conscious bacteria instead.
I'm going to tentatively disagree with that because the counterfactual of you ending up as a bacteria instead of a human is impossible, and therefore it doesn't factor into the probability estimates. Whether a bacteria can be conscious is besides the point. I may be committing some kind of Monty Hall fallacy, but don't currently think so.
The Veil of Ignorance is false if we're talking about physical reality.
Sadly I don't remember the name of it, but this argument about consciousness is in the same fashion. Except the odds are a _lot_ more surprising when compared with the population argument.
Doesn't this logic also imply that solipsism is true? 1 observer is less than 7 billion observers and therefore more likely under the logic of the Doomsday argument.
And I do see how this can lead to solipsism. In particular when combined with "Self-Indication Assumption: The possibility of not existing at all" [1] . Solipsism would be a theory that explains both - the doomsday original argument and this criticism.
But I haven't thought much about that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument#Self-Indicat...
I think its best answered with a few related questions to consider what makes us lucky:
1) Longevity clearly matters, but the relativity of it is hard to assess: some sea mammals with emotionally-rich lives live twice as long.
2) Quality of life clearly matters. It's easy to imagine (and hopefully you personally know some!) pampered pets who have it unbelievably good: tasty food and nutrition, regular fun exercise, a fulfilling social and family life, a sense of purpose, etc.
And on the other end of the spectrum:
3) There are untold numbers of us who pulled the short straw in life and have lives marred in tragedy and suffering -- if they even are "lucky" enough to live long enough to comprehend it.
I think some of us are incredibly lucky and very much in the minority. The "luck" spectrum in life is so both deep and wide that I'm perfectly happy accepting "consciousness is everywhere" in order to focus on the question of what to do with the consciousness (and unfortunate lack of it at times) I have.
What I am surprised about is not how sentimentally lucky I am, but how unlikely it is that my consciousness (which by the theory of consciousness being everywhere) ended up in the being that we consider to be "most conscious" (human). Even if I lived a very short life full of terror and pain - I still would be just as surprised that consciousness that could have been "planted" anywhere ended up in me - a human. And so the alternative theory of "only humans have consciousness" would be more attractive.
Personally, I find it astonishing that anyone could draw a line at humanity. For example, have you never bonded with a dog before? It's so blazingly clear that while there are obvious differences there are even more similarities behind how they think and feel. It's not just dogs: cows, pigs, and rats -- if you spend any time with them -- are obviously high on the spectrum. It's unfathomable that the line of consciousness is anywhere near being at humans alone.
My intent isn't to be insulting, but inviting! There is much splendor in connecting with non-human life, even if it doesn't have all the same qualities as human life :).
Probably anything that self replicates and has to fight for resources. Even a cell can have perception and behaviour. It's actually fascinating, but a network of DNA and proteins can function like a neural net inside a single cell.
https://www.youtube.com/c/CloserToTruthTV/videos
To me it seems like consciousness can only be passed from one being to another. And since we are all just a collection of cells, and everything that we are is coded inside a cell. It seems to me that consciousness must exist at the cellular level.
1) Your brain cells are just a special type of cell. How these brain cells send and receive signals, interact and make connection, is coded at the cellular level. Software without hardware to run on, is just text.
2) You are born with certain conscious behaviours that you don't need to learn. This behaviour must be passed between generations using DNA/RNA. Therefore the coding for that later behaviour must already be present when you were just two cells.
In my mind consciousness implies self-awareness and subjective experience. You might then be able to say that a phagocyte has some rudimentary form of consciousness, because it has a "behavior" of pursuing and destroying undesirable bacteria and particles in the body, so it must have some level of "perception" over which entities are to be targeted, and which to ignore. But at that level you can trace the behavior to chemical signaling and sub-cellular machinery, and it's possible to trace the phagocyte's behavior to simple cause-effect relationships in terms of physics and biochemistry. So I think it's hard to imagine that a phagocyte has "experience" in any real way.
I think when we talk about human consciousness, the content on which our subjective experience operates includes things like sensory information, verbal information and memories. And these types of information have neural representations which are quite clearly understood. And even for the task of consciousness, which is to interpret and contextualize all the sensory information coming into the brain, you can point to a brain region like the thalamus, which contains inputs from your senses, along with almost every other brain region, and make a reasonable argument that this might represent the physical manifestation of what we call consciousness.
See thoth.substack.com.