A philosophical theory where hard determinism and panpsychism are compatible

It does. When we look at criminals we nowadays take into account medical and psychological conditions, we are aware that people are not always in full control of what they are doing. This is obviously a weaker form than full blown determinism, but we certainly take into account that people are not completely free in their actions at all times. Similarly the assumption of a deterministic universe will influence ethics and morality, even though it will of course not be the only thing under consideration. [1]

[1] Ignoring the big complication that talking about considerations and things like that in a deterministic universe is itself something that needs a lot of care.

I agree that the concepts we use to deal with human minds are higher level concepts. I am somewhat hesitant to call them emergent because that does not seem to quite fit the common usage of the term, but if hard pressed, I would probably call them emergent at the end of the day, just in a more complex way than the color of things or the wetness of water emerges. I would also agree that some of the concepts are in one way or another substrate independent, i.e. they are not strongly tied to the underlying physics, i.e. you could build the same concept on top of other physics or maybe oven on top of something completely different, say mathematical set theory.

But...I don't think it valid to think of physics and minds as completely separable. If physics is deterministic, you do not get to introduce a fundamentally nondeterministic decision process at the level of minds. You can have one that seems nondeterministic to the mind because it lacks knowledge of all the positions and momenta of all the particles, but it would not be truly nondeterministic. You can also talk about a fictitious nondeterministic decision process that is just not realizable in the deterministic universe.

So I think there are at least two classes of human level concepts, those that are independent of the underlying physics and those that are not. And some times there will be overlap, prime example free will. Even in a deterministic universe you can have free will in one of the compatibilistic senses, say doing what you want to do, but you will neither get to determine what you want do, nor what you do or whether the two are the same.

Not at all. People seek to stop fires in order to protect others, but few believe fire carries blame for burning people. Of course, you need to believe that there is determinism (the fire is causing the burns, so stopping the fire will stop the burns), but that's it.

> And then you still have to account for whether the transgressor was coerced rather than was acting from their beliefs and desires (aka made a free choice).

This is still just a question about causality. The problem you are trying to solve is that people are getting hurt. You need to determine the ultimate cause for that in order to effectively solve it. So, if A is killing people that you want to live, you will want to first stop A from doing so. Next, you will have to determine what was causing A to kill people - if A was doing so because B paid for it, then you probably need to stop B as well: otherwise B may pay C to kill people even if A is in jail. If this has been determined, A may or may not need to be jailed at all, based on beliefs about whether A may still continue to kill people even if B has been stopped.

None of this requires some metaphysical notion of blame, it only requires a belief in determinism and a model of causality of behavior. A computer could be built that would take such decisions in a purely deterministic way, and using only information about purely physical facts (A performed act x, B performed act y, other people that share characteristics d, e, f with A performed act x, etc).

Well, this will quickly turn into the nuances of definitions of words. Blame can have several subtilely different meanings, so call it blame if you want. I will avoid that problem by saying that we go from asserting that a person did something wrong and could and should have done otherwise to asserting that a person did something wrong.

"Protecting others" carries an implicit assertion that failing to abide by this principle means you are broken [...]

Yes, if we have the principle that one person should not harm another and you do not follow that principle, then in a deterministic universe we would say that you are not behaving as expected, that you are broken if you want. Well, there is probably some nuance required here, are you really broken and will keep harming others or was this more like an exceptional situation making you misbehave once but unlikely to do so again?

"[...] rather than that the principle itself is mistaken, as would be true if you really believed blame didn't exist.

Take the example of some manufacturing robots, if one of them breaks and keeps crashing into others, then you will remove and replace the broken one, you are not going to blame it or assign any responsibility to it, because one of the wires connecting a sensor got lose. I do not see why enforcing a policy, categorizing behavior into acceptable and unacceptable behavior, requires blame in any form. We just categorize, we do not even have to look why something ended up in one category or the other. A related but different question is what our policy is, where the line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior lies.

And then you still have to account for whether the transgressor was coerced rather than was acting from their beliefs and desires (aka made a free choice).

That falls under the point mentioned above, more nuance, whether the behavior was situation specific or is likely inherent. But that is again independent of free will - whether I am determined to do bad things or freely decide to do bad things, one should try to prevent me from doing bad things.

And it matters even less in case of coercion, or maybe it is even more complicated in the case of free will. There is not really anything to be said about deterministic coercion to do a bad thing, but if you have free will, maybe you should have resisted more? This will not always apply, but at least sometimes you will have a choice to resist the coercion and probably experience some negative consequences in return, or to go along a cause negative consequences for others.

That is not the problem under discussion. The question actually sits in the definition of "choice". You seem to believe that something constitutes a (moral) choice only if the agent could do it or not without regard to its entire life of experiences up until that point. The more common notion of (moral) choice is that it constitutes any act which an agent takes without being coerced completely into it by some other agent. If my whole life up to this moment caused me to shoot you, that was a moral choice I made. If a dog bites my hand and pushes my finger into the trigger causing me to shoot you, then I didn't make a moral choice to shoot you (however, if someone is holding a knife to my throat and telling me they will kill me unless I shoot you, I'm still making a moral choice if I do so).

I should also note that laws don't typically make any mention about whether you had a choice in your actions. A related but extremely different criterion, used in insanity defenses, is whether you understood the nature of your actions at the time of committing the act. This is obviously fully compatible with a deterministic universe: I can understand the consequences of my actions even if I am fully compelled by circumstance to do them. Conversely, a person who is suffering from severe hallucinations, even in a world with strong free will, might shoot you while believing, say, that they are choosing to shoot a water gun at a painting. They made an explicit choice by any definition, but it's not a morally evil act since they didn't understand what they were actually doing.

To simplify things, assume a serial killer that would kill again, or a thief that would continue stealing. Why is imprisoning this person worse than more people falling victim to this person. And I really want to keep the focus on someone repeatedly breaking the law, one off crimes are probably much more tricky to deal with. The choice here is not between imprisoning and not imprisoning a person for doing something they could not avoid, in case of not imprisoning that person you have to take into account future harm. Same here, who knows what people will do in the future, even in a deterministic universe, but let us pretend we know, we can make things more complicated with probabilities and whatnot later.

As for "why it it seems that [free will exists]", I want to say that a combination of the Incompleteness Theorem, the fact that we don't know enough to grok the entire state of the universe, that we don't know what the future holds, and that we have the ability to reflect upon the past that gives the "illusion" of choice. But even asking that question seems to assume that we are discussing the illusion of free will from a perspective _outside of the universe_. Just like we must assume the universe exists, we must also assume that free will _seems_ like it exists.

It's not a gradualist notion. A computation either is or isn't consciousness. If it is, then an agent which is currently performing that computation is conscious. If an agent is performing a computation that is not consciousness is not conscious.

Similarly, certain computations represent a sort. Agents which are performing that computation are sorting. The clearest case is a computer running a sort algorithm, but there are also purely physical processes that perform the same computations, and animals or people that do it - so "agent" here is a very broad term. Agents which are performing a computation that is not a sort are not sorting.

Of course, determining which computation is actually consciousness is a very difficult problem, well beyond our current knowledge. As such, it is also obvious that it may turn out that this is not a correct model. But I don't see why this would be considered a ridiculous model of what consciousness means. It is also a model which can, in principle, be falsified, and it could actually help resolve certain difficult real-world problems. For example, if we did have a satisfying definition of which computations represent consciousness, we could then use it to determine at which point a child becomes conscious, or whether a particular animal is conscious or not (assuming we consider that conscious === should not be killed arbitrarily, which is a completely different debate).

By contrast, panpsychism doesn't really resolve anything and can't be used to determine the answer to this type of moral question even in principle (if any system is somewhat conscious, then even swiveling my chair means that I am destroying a conscious system; but also creating another one).

On your final paragraph - is what you're saying only true if you base all your decisions on the quantum mechanical equivalent of a coin flip? Or are you referring to something else?