Until we have a definition of consciousness that allows us to determine whether something is conscious or not I don’t really see the point of debating the compatibility of determinism and consciousness (whatever that word is supposed to mean).
I know that I am conscious and I cannot doubt it, but at the same time I cannot prove it to you. Furthermore, I strongly suspect and assume that other human beings are conscious, but I cannot verify this scientifically (i.e. measure it somehow).
This means that consciousness is a phenomenon that cannot be doubted (in the first person) but possibly eludes the scientific method. This really grates people who have a strong emotional attachment to the dogma that science must be able to account for all of reality.
People confuse the metaphysical commitment of materialism with scientific fact, and thus conclude that consciousness must be an emergent phenomenon of neural complexity, and that it is silly to believe that anything else could be conscious. This feels like an hyper-rational, scientific stance, but really it is not. Science works perfectly fine within other metaphysical commitments such as idealism, panpsychism, etc.
This is not to say that materialism is not correct, I do not know if it is or not. My point is that many contemporary "scientific types" tend to believe that their certainty about materialism being the correct framework is grounded on science, when it is not. It is often an unexamined and quasi-religious belief.
I don't think this is fully true, if you really examine this belief. You do have certain criteria that you use to determine, at least quasi-scientifically, if you should believe that some other entity is conscious or not. You say you believe "humans beings are conscious", but I would bet you don't believe that dead human beings are conscious, or that fertilized eggs are conscious. You may or may not believe that they are still conscious while under general anaesthesia, or while they are in clinical death. You may very much believe that certain things that are not human beings are also conscious - maybe dogs, or even all mammals, or even all vertebrates.
Your criteria probably start from the initial premise: I am conscious. Then, you apply a simple argument: I perform certain actions and/or display certain behaviors, and I have this conscious motivation for them. This other being performs these behaviors very similarly, so they probably have a similar consciousness motivating them to do so. You then test this assumption, and come up with more refined observations (e.g. not every similarity is equally related to consciousness - for example, you move around, and shadows move around, but it seems unlikely that shadows have consciousness so perhaps "move around" is not a good test for consciousness).
Therefore, what we call subjective experience is evidence for the existence of what we experience, but until we can empirically show that there is a difference between what we experience and what reality is, the only thing we can say is that it exists. Also, that's the problem with the hard problem of consciousness - it assumes a division between the two, and we have no evidence of such a division. And lastly if it's not clear i am not a panpsychist either because that assumes a division on some level again. We don't know what existence itself is and how it functions really, at least not the brains function within existence.
The division is between our third-person descriptions of reality in science, and our first-person "experience". You can't logically derive a first-person perspective only from third-person facts. That's what's at the heart of the hard problem. The eliminativist simply says that the first-person facts are a cognitive illusion, and so we really only have third-person facts, and the panpsychist says all third-person facts have an accompanying first-person component most of which we can't access.
but that is essentially The Hard Problem.
If something has (a) a robust temporal-spatial sense, a "reference frame" in time and space, (b) physical boundedness, (c) a robust and general predictive function which is capable of abstraction, (d) independent volition, and (e) behavior that is non-deterministic in the weak sense that its actions cannot easily be foreseen by any arbitrarily powerful computer within the universe that it resides in, then: That thing is conscious.
It's possible to imagine entities that don't necessarily satisfy all conditions and are nevertheless somehow conscious -- i.e., a sufficiently powerful AI that has no clear physical bounds and a poor (but not entirely absent) spatial reference frame, but which possesses independent volition and can independently simulate concepts -- but if all conditions are clearly met, then an entity is unambiguously conscious.
Is it really? I don't think compatibility with a crackpot idea/thing brings a blow to an orthogonal idea.
For example, I could believe that Mars is an alien base. This is crackpot, but it doesn't give any blow to countless other ideas it's compatible with, e.g. economic or social theories, gravity, explanations of historical eras, etc.
Where could that line possibly be?
I personally cannot reasonably even guess at such a boundary, so panpsychism is a much cleaner explanation.
These two ideas aren’t really mutually exclusive anyway. I.e. you can believe that consciousness is what it feels like to compute, but then “what is compute” except a particularly structured form of a thing that’s happening everywhere and all the time (particles and energy bouncing around) in more or less structured forms. And if you say “well not all energy/particle interactions are computation, even of an abysmally low degree,” then return to the first question: what types of interactions or what degrees of structure are non-computational where one rung above it they are computational?
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).
Even your “non-gradualist” explanation does in fact run into gradualist problems, as you mention one of when a child “becomes conscious.”
You assert that this theory is falsifiable: how so? You can’t even falsify the notion that there’s only one consciousness at all in the entire universe (yours, the one you’re “doing”).
Regarding moral implications, inconvenient moral conclusions are not the same as “no help in arriving at moral conclusions.” You just named one such conclusion that you’d be compelled to arrive at (I wouldn’t, personally), so it’s not really true it doesn’t help determine the answer.
A computation is a physical process. A pendulum swinging is a computation of the path that the pendulum will take (and of many other things). Whether there is some conscious being that observes and understands that computation or not is irrelevant to whether the computation is happening (that is, it won't affect the result in any way).
And yes, I am saying that one possible theory of consciousness is that some particular arrangement of matter and energy evolving in a certain way over time is consciousness. That is what I mean by a computational theory of consciousness. I am not in any way claiming I could define today which particular arrangement and evolution that is - I explicitly said I believe the specific model is far beyond our current understanding of the subject.
> Even your “non-gradualist” explanation does in fact run into gradualist problems, as you mention one of when a child “becomes conscious.”
I wouldn't call a theory that tells you that a system is either conscious or unconscious "gradualist". Yes, the system is not conscious at time A and becomes conscious at time A+1. This happens exactly the same way as any other computation: my processor is currently not performing a sort, and when it reaches the sort() call, it becomes sorting all of a sudden; when the call to sort() finishes, it is no longer sorting. Similarly, we can imagine a procedure consciousness(); when a system starts executing this procedure, by definition it becomes conscious; when it finishes executing it, it becomes not conscious.
> You assert that this theory is falsifiable: how so? You can’t even falsify the notion that there’s more than one consciousness at all in the entire universe (yours, the one you’re “doing”).
Well, it is falsifiable in two ways. First, there is the same extent as any mathematical model is falsifiable: we can check whether it accurately accounts for our intuitions. It's the same way we can check whether the formal definition of a continuous function is correct.
Now, once we accept that the proposed model matches what we intuitively mean by consciousness, it is further just as falsifiable as any other physical theory - it makes it so that the question "is system A conscious" (within the formal definition of consciousness I defined above) becomes a measurable claim about whether a particular system is performing a particular computation.
> Regarding moral implications, inconvenient moral conclusions are not the same as “no help in arriving at moral conclusions.” You just named one such conclusion that you’d be compelled to arrive at (I wouldn’t, personally), so it’s not really true it doesn’t help determine the answer.
If the conclusion is "any act you make is just as morally evil, since it leads to destroying a conscious system", that's not just inconvenient, it is by definition not helpful in making moral choices. It is as useless for arriving at moral conclusions as a very convenient model which says "no entity is conscious, so any choice you make is morally good".
Alternatively, if you believe the consciousness of a subject is irrelevant to moral choices, then any model of consciousness is also not helpful in arriving at moral conclusions.
And, if you believe that the amount of consciousness is the relevant bit for moral choices about a system, than still panpsychism is no help, since it only asserts that all things are conscious, it doesn't promise a model for determining which are more conscious and which are less conscious (you would need an additional model on top of panpsychism, perhaps something like integrated information theory at least).
A respectable philosophical idea with thousands of years behind it, and new impetus the past couple of decades.
Always best to have at least a basic understanding of a subject before using such dismissive terms.
You can read about it here: