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Comment by smokel | Hacker News Reader

I read the paper "On being an Octopus" by Peter Godfrey-Smith in "Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings" (2021). This book contains a lot of interesting material on consciousness.

Previous to that I had been meditating a lot on what it is like to be a rock.

No sense of time, no memory, no input at all. For all the rock knows, time would run in reverse, or jump all over the place. Obviously, the rock doesn't know about space either. Now if you are able to think up a universe without animals or humans, this opens up a lot of room to doubt some basic beliefs.

I recently found out that someone [1] ridiculed the philosophy on "what it's like to be" by using a rock as well. I was slightly disappointed by this, because the rock metaphor works fine for me. Perhaps I misunderstood the article.

[1] https://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/like...

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Yeah I seem to recall that essay was intended to mock Nagel's famous thoughts on the perspective of a Bat [1]

You may be aware you are on safe philosophical ground, ponderers of the hard question have pointed out there is not obviously reason to think consciousness is special to beings more complicated than thermostats. [2]

[1] http://www.philosopher.eu/others-writings/nagel-what-is-it-l...

[2] https://consc.net/notes/lloyd-comments.html

I write a lot about geology and to me rocks are anything but static entities. Their timescales are different, but their memory structures are deep and long-lasting. To me, being a rock is to see millions of years of constant change in a single arc… well, unless you are an Archean outcrop.

A decent book on octopus intelligence (by the same author) is Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness [0].

0 - https://www.amazon.com/dp/0374537194/

> No sense of time, no memory, no input at all. For all the rock knows, time would run in reverse, or jump all over the place.

Even rocks suffer erosion. There is a timeline with respect to how much the rock is being eroded.

Why do you think that there's something that it's like to be a rock? Assuming panpsychism, you still need to come up with a reason that consciousness is aggregating at the "rock" level, rather than at the mineral crystal level or what not.

And what about as the rock crumbles? Rocks are constantly eroding and re-amalgamating. What is it like to be sandstone? What is it like to be a magma flow?

Is there something it is like to be a severed limb? What about a clipped toenail? A pile of leaves? It is not obvious that just because we as humans identify something as “an object” that it must follow that that object has an internal experience.

I personally don't think that the rock has consciousness. I merely try to ponder what it would be like to be a rock.

There is so little to hold on to, given that the rock has no brain, no senses. To me, that implies that there are no concepts, there is no abstraction. Given that most of the universe is gas and rocks, and not brain, it makes me wonder a bit.

My approach is not scientific in a direct way, but I think that, in the long run, it might be helpful to come up with new ideas about reality.

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