What if everything is conscious?
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Another way of phrasing it which highlights the fallacy is:
"In a nutshell, the problem is this: You’re alive. But if you’re just made of non-alive matter, why and how exactly could life arise from that?"
Just because we don't know exactly how life arose from non-biotic matter doesn't mean that non-biotic matter is alive. And just because we don't know how consciousness arose, exactly, doesn't mean that all matter is conscious.
The original emergence of life is rather mysterious/special, but the mechanics of how it now propagates out of “dead” matter is not.
This is not true of consciousness. We cannot find any evidence of anything in particular that would “turn the lights on” in matter that didn’t previously have the lights turned on.
There are myriads of things you can't explain about life in any terms. Just that you did not go deep enough to experience them.
The one exception is consciousness.
That’s the thing that seems to be missing from every one of these discussions… everyone just seems to assume some vague, fuzzy definition of consciousness and nobody calls anyone on it.
My 2¢: we don’t have a working definition of consciousness. Every attempt at doing so is self referential and/or completely subjective. The term is meaningless and every discussion on whether something is conscious or not is a complete waste of time and energy.
Then don't participate! :)
What a great definition of consciousness!
There is no requirement for definition. Each and everyone of us (gpt bots excluded) experiences consciousness continually, in various modalities. The experience is shared.
For example, considering the nature of consciousness and the possible mechanics behind it, we could consider sights. Seeing. We all see things in our minds (and only in our minds!) and we have the first 1/2 of the process pathway mapped out. Light hits a matrix of cells in the 'sensor' which then encodes the sensory data as chemical signals which then side-effect a neural net.
Kindly explain -- using physics -- to YOURSELF how you got from a changed states to perception of light in your mind. The experience of consciousness is not a mystery nor is it 'obscure'. Follow up is to note that it is equally wrongheaded to ask if a rock or something/someone else is conscious.
Can you explain what you experience in terms of known science and please no hand waving about 'the most complex structure in universe'. The said structure changes states. There is no 'projection room' in the "neural net". There is no decoding final stage that takes matrix input and maps it to a 2D representation (generative AI) etc.
Sure there is. If the subject of discussion is “is X a kind of Y?”, you can’t proceed without defining Y. Saying “duh, you know what Y is” doesn’t change this. I could have a very different definition of Y in my head than you, and the discussion quickly spirals into madness as we all talk right past each other.
> Each and everyone of us (gpt bots excluded) experiences consciousness continually, in various modalities. The experience is shared.
If the definition of consciousness is simply “that thing that we in particular have”, then of course nothing else has consciousness, because you’ve excluded everything but us by definition! Yawn. What a boring discussion.
The rest of your comment proceeds similarly, with the conclusion that we need to be able to explain our particular experiences. Of course nothing else has consciousness if this is our working definition. If “consciousness” is that thing that arises from what a human brain does, then yeah sure, only a human brain has it. But if you actually make an attempt to classify it by defining it in a non-trivial, non-circular way, you’ll find that nearly everything about it can be applied to non-humans too.
Ho hum, I’m bored. These discussions are just pointless.
(No, I’m not going to try and define consciousness, because I maintain that there is no definition. You can say anything you want about it and be equally wrong or right, it doesn’t really matter because it means whatever you want it to.)
> If the definition of consciousness is simply ...
No one is defining consciousness. You are simply referred to what is expected to be a common shared experience. Then the question is posed to you: please explain to yourself how (merely) a structure is affording the phenomena of what you experience. Physics only please.
This is sufficient to dethrone any purely structural notions. Which is huge, actually. And informative.
Insisting on "what is the definition" allow for various nonsense, hand waving, and large claims regarding the nature of some mechanism.
> Ho hum, I’m bored. These discussions are just pointless.
QED. That's because you insist on missing the point. Naturally it makes for boring discussion. Choose to not engage in such discussions if not contributing anything beyond the red herring of lack of definition for consciousness.
Our shared experience is a real thing, yes. But it’s worthless to ask whether something that’s not a human has our shared experience, because we’ve excluded it by definition. If you asked “does ChatGPT experience the world identically to the way we do?”, the answer is trivially “no”, since we’re human and it’s an LLM. But if you change the question to “is ChatGPT conscious?”, suddenly this is supposed to be a less trivial question? No, you said yourself, nobody’s even willing to define consciousness, and when prodded, we default to “that thing we have”, and how exactly is that supposed to illuminate anyone towards a meaningful answer to the question.
Of course ChatGPT is not a human, duh. If you aren’t willing to state your terms, and “consciousness” isn’t willing to be defined an inch past our noses, then it ceases to be a useful to discussion to ask whether anything is conscious.
> please explain to yourself how (merely) a structure is affording the phenomena of what you experience. Physics only please.
The structure and what I experience are the same thing. My brain/senses/body apparatus is a thing that by its very construction includes the ability to ponder and reason about stuff, and experience the world. It is this way because it is this way. There is no “me” separate from the structure, so there is no ability to ask “how do I experience the world given only this structure?”
I am the structure, the structure is me.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserved_word
"Flagged" article, wow that's unexpected.
Like trying to define the boundaries of the universe (with the caveat that of course there’s nothing outside the universe and there’s presumably stuff outside of consciousness, just we never experience it directly)
I believe what it's running up against is culture.
https://hbr.org/2018/03/what-breaking-the-4-minute-mile-taug...
We are conditioned to be dumb. To be clear, I'm not saying it's necessarily intentional (though I am very suspicious), but it isn't physics or (only) Mother Nature that's caused the problem, it is our own actions, or lack thereof. People cannot think about consciousness skilfully for the same reason most people can't think about physics skilfully: it requires particular education. And it isn't just consciousness that requires special education, have you seen the train wreck that politics/geopolitics and economics are? Heck, we can't even reproduce any more in a lot of Western countries.
> There’s no way for us to define the system from inside the system.
How could one know such a thing? Plus, Humans "define" things all the time, there is no requirement for any the stories we tell each other to be correct. People (and the smarter the better) seem to downright revel in it.
> Like trying to define the boundaries of the universe (with the caveat that of course...
Yes, of course.
See how easy it is!
> just we never experience it directly
How could you possibly know the entirety of all human experiences? Let me guess: a story? Perhaps one based on critical thinking and science, that makes complete sense (so it must be true, as per critical thinking)?
Biology is the ultimate spaghetti code - there are causal loops between all the layers of abstraction (I guess as a result of enormous optimisation pressure and lots of time). I think that makes full-scale reductionism like you're describing a bit hopeless.
edit: Anyway, we probably don't disagree about much here, I just think that this appeal to reductionism is a common fallacy.
We use this knowledge every day to predict and produce new drugs (though again, we are not very good at it).
Genes may be made up of such particles but they are their own concept, with their own interactions, which cannot be reduced to that of their constituents. You could argue that in theory you can measure the state of each particle in all of an organism's genes and simulate them according to the laws of particle physics, but that's not actually possible even in principle, for the simple reason that measuring a system to that degree would destroy it (the uncertainty principle).
There are lots of these "causal blankets" in the world, and I think they're a real challenge to the idea that everything is reducible to particle physics.
Personal question, no obligation to answer.
Psychedelics are really great at showing you just how much “work” consciousness is doing, and just how fungible all of its contents are. And the most important insight, which is that everything “out there” in the world — everything you experience — is actually an internal, subjective representation.
The way I’ve described it is that we’re all in our own sensoriums, but that is generally totally opaque to us. Psychedelics can temporarily knock that sensorium askew — enough to notice that it’s there all the time and doesn’t have to be configured the way that it happens to be.
The reason I have reluctantly come to believe in panpsychism is because I haven’t heard anything close to a better explanation of when, where, and why “the lights are on.” There’s no reason to think there’s something special about brain matter in particular. There’s probably something special about information processing, but then: what is information processing? Information is just a local reduction in entropy, and all sorts of things are doing that in all sorts of ways all over the universe.
> The way I’ve described it is that we’re all in our own sensoriums, but that is generally totally opaque to us. Psychedelics can temporarily knock that sensorium askew — enough to notice that it’s there all the time and doesn’t have to be configured the way that it happens to be.
Considering this: do you find it a bit strange that ~all people (including yourself above) write as if the opposite of this is true? I mean sure, "people are imperfect" and "everyone is just expressing their opinion" are attractive memes (cultural "truths" that emerge from the very same simulation), but is there not perhaps something important going on that might be worth paying at least a little attention to?
Did the psychedelics not teach you that knowledge of all like this may not be genuine? And never even mind that, is there good reason to trust what consciousness tells us in the first place? Sure, people have matching stories so that's a good sign, except the stories don't match over time.
Not the person you're responding to but for me that's compelling evidence that there is something like an objective reality out there (even if apes can't perceive it clearly).
Watch out for how you're calculating utility though (or, if you are not actually calculating it and this fact isn't even on your radar).
> but any such concept of "underlying truth" (below/separately from what's useful) doesn't even have meaning
Watch out for this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_and_indirect_realism
a) a theory makes predictions that match the results of a set of prescribed experiments
b) those results are reproducible by unrelated third parties following the same experimental guidelines
For some theories like EM we're at the point where the body of known experiments and predictions is so vast, and so many edge-cases have been probed, that we basically expect the results to generalise to the known universe.
But yeah, there's a long tail of science with a much weaker claim to "truth" or utility than this. I agree with you (I think? might have misunderstood you) that it starts to become more of a cultural or social phenomenon in these cases.
Very much part of my concern. And within that there is the phenomenon whereby the harm science causes (say, global warming") somehow doesn't count. Only the end users of the things science brought into existence bear any burden of responsibility.
Also: science can change its story whenever it likes[1], and this is to its benefit (of reputation) rather than its detriment.
Science has the best rhetoric/marketing game in existence imho. Whether it is the best possible remains to be seen.
[1] Christianity did this too with The New Testament, which satisfies those who subscribe to that framework, but it is highly vulnerable to an attack from other ideologies with better game (currently: only science).
But I also think you're making a bit of a map/territory conflation. I think what "is" has nothing to do with human culture - you drop a rock from head height, it's going to hit your foot, and this is "true" (observable maybe a better word) regardless of who you are (and more importantly, regardless of what you claim!). This is what I meant by the stories matching over time in some domains.
The ontological claims (the "map") change all the time in science, as they must! But I don't think reality (the "territory") does, in the same way that the ocean doesn't manifest dragons if I draw one on a seafaring chart.
Completely agree that science may not be the best epistemic theory possible. In fact, I'd stick my neck out and say that the scientific habit of reductionism seems to be floundering for things like complex biological systems (brains/ecologies/controversially even consciousness?) and maybe even understanding machine learning models. Perhaps we'll see some interesting developments in the next few decades =)
Right....but:
- what is that has nothing to do with human culture (or consciousness, or the machines we build) is only a subset of the larger set of what is
- quite often, humans drop rocks and other things onto the heads of other humans - religion has always got a lot of blame for this phenomenon, but a lesser known fact is that science plays a massive role in it as well: giving us the technology to do it in ever more powerful and affordable ways
> This is what I meant by the stories matching over time in some domains.
Some stories match, some do not. Religion also has plenty of each.
> But I don't think reality (the "territory") does, in the same way that the ocean doesn't manifest dragons if I draw one on a seafaring chart.
Dragons may not exist in The Universe, but that doesn't mean they can't can exist in reality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popper%27s_three_worlds
If you don't believe me, go do a survey of the general public about things that "don't exist" and see what kind of results you get. For bonus results, try disagreeing with some people and see how that goes over.
> Completely agree that science may not be the best epistemic theory possible.
You and I are members of an exclusive group!
> that the scientific habit of reductionism seems to be floundering for things like complex biological systems (brains/ecologies/controversially even consciousness?) and maybe even understanding machine learning models.
Also: Reality.
> Perhaps we'll see some interesting developments in the next few decades =)
Yes...perhaps we will!
Ideas seem to have a dynamics of their own, and I'm pretty open-minded to the possibility that things which exist in the collective human mental substrate (world 2?) can exert causal influence of their own, in a certain sense, on world 1. In a way that maybe can't be reduced to physical interaction in any kind of useful predictive fashion?
I don't have the language to think about those concepts clearly right now!
You've left me with lots to ponder, thanks =) it's actually very cool to see Popper himself talking about the metaphysics of this stuff. Some of my physics friends would probably be a bit shocked by that...
I super, super highly recommend reading William James' work on this topic. I unfortunately can't remember which essay went into it in detail...
Replace "genuine" with true or accurate...accurate enough that nothing important is left out.
My intuition is that you are motivated to not understand. I have no particular problem with this, provided you acknowledge it explicitly. Watch this:
I am being "pedantic"[1]. This is an explicit acknowledgement of it. I am seeking ever more accurate descriptions of what is going on.
I will be even more brutal:
> there's no reason to think that that stack of unfathomably complex and highly chaotic interactions is anything but chemical/electrical/thermal interactions.
"Reasons" exist in the minds of all people. It seems to you (it is your experience) that you possess knowledge of the contents of all minds, but you do not actually. It seems like you know what any scientific theorist would tell you, but you do not really. You query your mind on the subject, it gives you an answer. If you are not omniscient (I believe you are not), and an accurate study has not been done (at most, a half-assed survey has been done, of a small portion of the whole), then the result must be(!) simulated, at least by my thinking.
Here are some articles on the phenomenon in play here (full disclosure: we both suffer from it):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-problem/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/psychology-normative-cogn... <--- I believe this is the most dangerous one, like the root cause
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology (this is the study of existence)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology (this is the study of knowledge and truth)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_realism_(psychology... (this is an overview of how Allistic Humans think almost all of the time)
> "Best known explanation" is inherently socially constructed, as it requires consensus
For Allistic people (Normies), yes. But I suffer from autism, and I have weaponized it: I have chosen "Defect"[2] in this little game you people are playing. I see you (but only to the degree that I can, "pedantically"/tautologically), but you cannot see me (in the same way). I can intercept and attach a debugger "to a substantial degree" to my thinking, you do not have this ability. You are bound by culture.
Bold claims, eh! Watch this, I will now make a bold prediction of the future: you will[3] ~declare (implicitly or explicitly) yourself to be correct, and me incorrect, and as proof you will present a narrative based story. What you will not do: acknowledge what is going on here (you are expressing your opinion at best, etc), and what the true epistemic status(es) of this situation is: unknown[4].
There seems to be this weird phenomenon whereby when you point consciousness at itself, it starts behaving strangely. I have very little evidence of this other than large quantities of observation, but I have developed a strong intuition that there is something hardcoded in us that disallows that. This is obviously a "way out there, woo woo level" belief, and it is seems inconsistent with the theory of evolution (at least in the way it manifests), so I am not sure what to make of it. I can see why the ability (for conscious reflection) is uncommon, but I cannot see why a hardwired inability is ~ubiquitous. I wonder if it is somehow similar to how incest is repulsive...except that is taught to us quite explicitly, whereas if anything the opposite seems to be true of self-reflection (which is why it seems ~supernatural to me).
------------------------
[1] I use quotation marks because I am using the word colloquially (how Allistic people experience the word), not technically (consistent with the actual definition).
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma
[3] This is one option, there seem to be about 4 choices (that are accessible) when a Human is put into this setting; doubling down with more story telling tends to be most common
[4] Full disclosure: this (the entire sentence) is (partially) a trick - I am testing if an explicit, unmistakable challenge to (at least attempt) ~transcendence might work. At the very least, it creates a fun elephant in the room situation. See also: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FourthWall
That we are not able to understand how, doesn't prove that life and consciousness arise from anything besides physics. Magic doesn't exist.
I'm not foreign to the irony of a dumb monkey declaring something doesn't exist, but I think it's been overwhelmingly clear through the ages that magic never has had any direct effect outside our imaginations.
I think the wording made me assume you thought those processes had supernatural aid instead of the the incessant trial-and-error of the universe. That's a common argument when discussing the origin of life and consciousness.
This itself seems a bit magical.
Do atoms exist?
If so, when did they start to exist?
Considering how many things are a portion of our body and simultaneously considered separate living organisms it's pretty bizarre to have such an explicitly defined view of consciousness in our existence that can let you point at a cat or human and say "That is a conscious being".
We know what that means to us but we can only assume others have similar experiences.
And the only way to do that is by looking at behaviours.
So we point at cats and humans and say they're conscious because they demonstrate behaviours that we associate with our subjective experience of consciousness - goal seeking and planning, apparent emotional responses, awareness of context, decision making, pattern- and repetition-based learning, and other kinds of responsiveness and agency.
It's a very specific idea of what consciousness is, and it only really applies at human scale.
If an object/entity/subsystem experienced qualia of any kind - including the experience of any kind of self-object, from the most rudimentary to the most universal - without demonstrating any of the behaviours at a human scale, we'd never know.
some argue (using data and experimentation) that trees and/or other plants express all of these behaviors
I think the common conceptualization of consciousness is the only definition that is useful, or makes sense. Which is something that can experience things. For many reasons, I don't think these rudimentary behaviors in plants suggest they are capable of experience.
But also jellyfish has goal seeking behavior, and a most of those other characteristics you mention, and my intuition (based on the vastly different neural structure and anatomy), is that they experience probably nothing.
I know I see the color red in a particular way. I have a consciousness experience of seeing red things that _feels like_ something. I can talk about wavelengths, or put color into a theory, but none of this explains the feeling of seeing the color red.
How do I know if someone else has the same subjective experience as me regarding color, or taste, or thought form? I don't, it can't be known.
This "it can't be known" (unfeasibility of proving or disproving anything about this phenomenon) is enough for most science-like minds to discard all of this as nonsense. For these, there is no phenomenon, this subjective experience arises from emerging properties.
The emerging properties model is not unfeasible, we could test it, if we were able to observe these properties emerging. However, we didn't, it's hard. Although feasible, it has not been proven or disproven, and modeling the brain has been a challenge.
So, for now, the only thing you can point and say "that is a conscious being" with abolsute confidence is yourself. Only you know that, and you can't share that proof. This notion was popularized as the philosophical zombies thought experiment.
Maybe it is a tool trying to optimize food acquisition. That's not a completely unreasonable idea. But how would you go about testing that hypothesis? How can you know that some abstract process is working when you can't even prove to others it exists?
One thing you can do is disrupt the smaller individual components that make up the emergent property, and see if the property continues to exist.
I.e. you can put a motorized egg beater in your brain, and see if you still have the emergent properties of consciousness. My prediction is that the property will suddenly disappear.
Or can cut off blood to the brain for a little while.
The counter-argument will be that the consciousness unrecognizably changes, and once the blood comes back, that configuration of matter generally restores. None of this is convincing to me in any way, and I genuinely desperately want someone (a panpsychist) to explain how I'm thinking about this incorrectly.
I'm not implying consciousness is some mythical undiscovered force. My point is: How would you know if the components that you are toying with are indeed relevant to consciousness and not some proxy or supporting structure?
The answer is: you can't know. You can reach lesser conclusions (under the effect of drug X, area Y of the brain has decreased activity, resulting in change of behavior Z), but it says nothing about that subjective experience I mentioned earlier (qualia).
I don't doubt we could brute force this into a meaningful discovery, carefully mapping each part of the brain until we figure it out completely, including qualia. We're not there yet though.
If interested, the reason I don't like the radio analogy is that it presupposes that the configuration of the brain, and inputs isn't fundamentally the constituents of consciousness.
On the flip side, to fix the analogy: if I cut off the antenna of a radio, I would argue it ceases to become a radio by any reasonable definition (assuming we're talking about a device that receives radio waves and plays them back in the form of sound). You just have something that's very close to a radio. It has nothing to do with whether radio waves exist or don't.
As long as you agree that it's conceivable that there's experimentation (brute force or otherwise), then I think we're on the same page.
I think the onus is on the brain folks. In order to solve this, they need to prove that qualia lives as an emergent property in the brain. I'm not presuposing tht the consciousness lives somewhere outside the brain, I'm asking for proof that it does (which is reasonable).
What we have is proof of neither and no way to get there. The reductionist approach offers a more systematic way of approaching the problem, but there are no guarantees. Breaking down a problem into smaller questions is not a proof if there are still smaller questions unanswered.
I forget which Greek philosopher it was who described the forces of nature in terms of solids "loving" the ground and "hating" the sky and likewise the other forms of matter "loving" and "hating" various positions in space.
Everything is conscious (in the minds of the things which are actually conscious).
It's not much more than a philosophical fantasy tale.
That answers the question of how pretty much every biological feature is produced and propagated, except the question of how/when/where something goes from being unconscious to conscious.
Consciousness is a spectrum. Even humans, the pinnacle of known consciousness, can go from conscious to unconscious and back fairly easy. What's the exact instant when the sky turns from red to blue in a sunrise?
The question is what happens between zygote formation and an adult human. Either the zygote “has consciousness” in it already, or consciousness appears at some point in development. So the question is: when?
Panpsychism is not a scientific view. We are far, far too early for it even if it’s true.
It actually specifically wouldn't do the thing you mention. Why on earth would you get less interested in the brain if other things are conscious too? There's clearly a lot that's unique about brains compared to other objects in the universe.
This tiny interaction I think is the the entire problem with how panpsychists talk about this.
Some panpsychists might try to actually say that there's a potential that trees and rocks have an internal subjective experience that is in some way comparable to human conscious experience (i.e. they feel some kind of "pain," that "hurts" them, and they "suffer". But I contend we have very little reason to believe that, and a lot of reason not to believe that. For example, with very, very little modification to my biology, I can eliminate this experience in myself (painkillers, anesthesia, other drugs, falling into a deep sleep, etc.)
Once you even slightly disrupt the structure of our brains functioning, it all falls apart. We feel nothing.
I think even most panpsychists would not take the above position, and would instead say "oh well, plant consciousness is entirely unrecognizable and might not even have reasonable continuity of consciousnesses. "Pain" wouldn't even make sense to a plant or a rock. We're just saying that the matter that constitutes plants and rocks have a very tiny (relative to humans) kind of "experience" but it's a huge mistake to anthropomorphize that, and you shouldn't feel like you're making grass "suffer" by cutting it.
^and if it's the second case, it's unprovable and uninteresting and "literally meaningless. Irrelevant."
Okay well that's silly and I've not met even one panpsychist who believes this "comparable to human conscious experience" portion
> Once you even slightly disrupt the structure of our brains functioning, it all falls apart. We feel nothing.
This isn't true. You can literally cut a brain in half and you appear to get two separate consciousnesses in one skull.
> I think even most panpsychists would ...
Sure... so why are you spending so much breath attacking the obviously weak form of the argument?
> ^and if it's the second case, it's unprovable and uninteresting and "literally meaningless. Irrelevant."
There have been lots of things, in fact pretty much all of them, that were unprovable and uninteresting until they weren't. People have to work hard to build the frameworks to talk about, test, and ultimately understand the universe. That's what people are trying to do with consciousness. It can be "too early" for your tastes, but that doesn't make the endeavor meaningless.
You, yourself, and Philip Goff and others talk about how "we might want to treat trees differently" suggesting (correct me if I'm misunderstanding you) that cutting a tree might "hurt" the tree, or cause "pain" to the tree, which is exactly what I mean by "comparable to human conscious experience."
> This isn't true. You can literally cut a brain in half and you appear to get two separate consciousnesses in one skull.
What you're saying doesn't address what I'm saying. I did not say that, exhaustively, all changes to the brain disrupt everything. Rather, I will clarify that there exist a subset of extremely small disruptions you can make to the brain that "turn the lights off" of consciousness in humans. Among them are a fairly tiny dose of anesthetic, or not breathing for about 5 minutes.
> Sure... so why are you spending so much breath attacking the obviously weak form of the argument?
Because I'm replying to a comment that suggests we might treat trees differently (if Panpsychicism were true). I would consider a statement like that to be the first category of panpsychist.
> ... but that doesn't make the endeavor meaningless.
I didn't say the endeavor is meaningless. I'm a strong proponent of prodding anything we can about consciousness, or anything in our universe for that matter. What's "too early for my tastes" is to believe the Panpsychist hypothesis is currently the best explanation.
But even if I didn't have a more compelling explanation, that doesn't mean I can't be highly critical of, or reach a conclusion that panpsychicism is highly unlikely to be approaching a good explanation.
But also, see the rest of my comment. The onus is not on me to arrive with a better explanation just because there's a bad explanation on the table.
If I come home and find a cookie on my counter, and someone said "I think that a space alien teleported the cookie there" and I said "I think that's unlikely to be the correct explanation." And then that person asked "Well, what's a better explanation?" and I said "Maybe someone broke into my apartment, felt guilty, and left a cookie there." and then grilled me on that counter-explanation.
So far I don’t think you’ve shared a better one, and I don’t think you think you have either.
If you try it and end up somewhere else, let me know! I’d be genuinely interested to hear about it.
My conclusion is that panpsychism is god of the gaps for consciousness right now.
For clarity: are all the things you've said above your opinion, or are you presenting then as facts (which was my interpretation)?
To me that's very strong evidence it is something physical, tied to functions of our bodies, and not something shared by everything.
Edit: I should elaborate on how it relates. Some would say that the alcohol or foreign substances are disrupting the combination of the consciousness of the matter, disrupting the overall consciously experience that makes up your matter. So, for example, now there's a bunch of little consciousnesses that aren't "combined".
The "is" physical (has a physical component, as opposed to equals or is purely) makes sense, but how does "not something shared by everything" logically follow?
If someone else drinks alcohol, my consciousness doesn't change.
What does "consciousness doesn't change" mean?? Like, there's zero change in the state of it?
If consciousness is just some form of self-reference and autopoiesis via cellular automaton, there's little reason to believe it couldn't extend to the extremes of the macro or micro scale.
I think this is a redefinition of consciousness and shifts the problem of explaining when an entity has an experience like we all think about experiences, which was the interesting part in the first place.
It's an idea comes from Card's Mormon background.
Strawson argues these aren't analogous to consciousness. He claims other emergent properties can be explained by their constituents' physical properties and arrangements, but consciousness can't be reduced this way.
Thing is, Strawson's giving consciousness special treatment. It's basically an argument from incredulity. Our current inability to explain consciousness doesn't make it impossible. This gap in our understanding doesn't justify jumping to radical solutions like panpsychism.
Historically, science has explained countless "inexplicable" phenomena through emergent processes. Treating consciousness as a unique case requiring extraordinary explanations goes against the trend of scientific progress.
TL;DR: Strawson's making consciousness a special case without sufficient justification. It's premature to assume we need radical solutions just because we can't explain it yet.
Or rather...
I am the only thing that's conscious.
It's also not pattern matching, though.
This is why western science falls short in topics of consciousness, spirituality, mysticism compared to eastern wisdom where people always talked about these things in dialectical, poetic ways.
Then we're really screwed.
Size matters.
Citation needed