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Comment by superb-owl | Hacker News Reader

> the bizarre solution panpsychism proposes to the problem of how to fit consciousness into the natural world is completely unnecessary

This line highlights the core difference between panpsychists and their critics.

Personally, I think panpsychism is an elegant, simple, and natural solution to the Hard Problem. It strikes me as having a strong prior probability, i.e. if you were describing a hypothetical universe to me, I'd put the odds of "everything in the universe is capable of perception" at something like 50/50.

Critics seem to think this is bizarre, and put it in the bucket of "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". I understand why, but I disagree. I think this is yet another example of anthropocentric thought, which has continually fallen to more inclusive models (e.g. heliocentrism and evolution)

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The problem with panpsychism is not that it is unnecessary or not anthropocentric, but that it is provably false. If everything was conscious then full anesthetic (removal of consciousness with neurotoxic chemicals) wouldn't work.

It does work though, which makes it clear that consciousness is a property produced by a mechanism in the brain.

That’s a strawman though.

Pansychism says that everything manifests qualia, not that you can’t change what kind of qualia with drugs — obviously you can, as anyone who has taken recreational ones knows. You can also change it with a bullet, though that doesn’t revert after.

Panpsychism doesn't claim that everything has complex sensory perception, higher reasoning, memory, etc. The hard problem isn't about any of those things, which indeed have clear neuronal correlates and can easily be turned off.

The idea is that there's always "something that it's like to be X", where X can equally be a conscious human, an anesthetized human, a dead human, or an electron.

Can this be measured? Does panpsychism predict a difference in worlds that have this property versus those that don't? I don't think it does, but maybe I'm missing something. If it's impervious to empirical evidence then I don't think it has sufficient rigor to be considered a viable hypothesis.

Great question. Most people would probably say no, panpsychism is unfalsifiable.

On the other hand, brains certainly do seem to function like qualia detectors (as evidenced by everyone talking about qualia). So, who knows, maybe there's something further to be explored there; maybe it's related to the combination problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism#Combination_proble...).

Can any solution to this problem have a measurable solution? The problem domain is the experience of subjectivity itself.

You're correct, as far as we know, the hypothesis of panpsychism is unfalsifiable.

The idea that this makes it unviable is called Logical Positivism. Personally, I think Logical Positivism is short-sighted and uncomfortable with ambiguity. But that's more of an aesthetic preference than a scientific assertion.

Then where did the brain come from? Turtles all the way down!

I totally agree. It feels very plausible that the universe started with and runs on consciousness, along the lines of the creation myths that go from 1 to many.

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