Sabine Hossenfelder's opinion on pan-psychism and why it can't be true from a physics standpoint: https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/01/electrons-dont-thi...
Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
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Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
#62Even the theory's advocate acknowledges in this interview that it's untestable. There is no way to observe that the world would behave differently whether or not the theory is true. If that's so, I can't think what point there is discussing it, except as a mental exercise. If you can't test a theory, that means it can't affect anything. I.e. it has no practical use, except as a form of entertainment. I would almost a…
> I would almost argue that it doesn't make sense to talk about something being true or untrue if it cannot be tested nor used to make any predictions.
The theory can’t be tested by experiment, but I do think it can be critiqued in terms of internal logical consistency. In that regard, a well structured theory of consciousness could have powerful structure, and much like abstract mathematics lead to practical results.
Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
#63It always amazes me how much people refuse the reality of consciousness. Just goes to show you the mental gymnastics people will use to contort themselves in order to maintain some semblance of coherency in their world view.
Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
#64Isn't this the idea behind Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials ?
He talks about Dust giving everything consciousness, but I don't recall that he ever really goes into the details of what that means.
Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
#65An interesting thought experiment is to imagine an incredibly-detailed computer simulation of a brain, down to the level of individual cells and neurotransmitters. (While this is beyond our current capabilities, it is in principle possible.) Hook the brain up to some decent IO devices, and you’d have an extremely human-like “AI”. (I’m glossing over some tricky details like, do you start with a fetus/baby brain and le…
> down to the level of individual cells and neurotransmitters
My guess? No, it won’t be conscious or even meaningful.
More fundamentally, our inability to answer this question drives at our ignorance of our own neurology. We don’t know the building blocks of thought. It might happen at the neurochemical or electrochemical level. It may even depend on quantum effects.
Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think I missed anything, if you already decided what is wrong - this is not a honest search - you just want to find something which satisfies your views.
I think he/she wants something that isn't circular and therefore meaningless.
Again, you put restriction of meaningful answer. But why not beautiful answer? Or poetic answer? Or funny one? Ultimately you still decided what you want first and then trying to find what fits.
Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
#67I think non-duality / advaita makes much more sense than panpsychism, as it requires less assumptions while remaining compatible with our experience. Panpsychism seems like a bandaid to solve the hard problem of consciousness, which non-duality does not suffer from.
Am really pleased you name dropped "advaita vedanta" (literally translated from Sanskrit as "non-secondness"). From the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on advaita vedanta:
Brahman—the ultimate, transcendent and immanent God of the latter Vedas—appears as the world because of its creative energy (māyā). The world has no separate existence apart from Brahman. The experiencing self (jīva) and the transcendental self of the Universe (ātman) are in reality identical (both are Brahman), though the individual self seems different as space within a container seems different from space as such. These cardinal doctrines are represented in the anonymous verse “brahma satyam jagan mithya; jīvo brahmaiva na aparah” (Brahman is alone True, and this world of plurality is an error; the individual self is not different from Brahman). Plurality is experienced because of error in judgments (mithya) and ignorance (avidya). Knowledge of Brahman removes these errors and causes liberation from the cycle of transmigration and worldly bondage.
Modern indian philosophy has hitherto been focused on problems specific to the nation-state: modernity, integral yoga, etc. But it will be interesting to see how it grapples with new discoveries in neuroscience.
The references in classical indian literature I really admire always refer to "destroying illusion (maya)". Learning how to remove false cognition from pure sense perception. And seeing things with the vision of Brahman ;)
Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Consider the following: your consciousness, that experience you have of being, the one that --in the minds of many-- separates you from a computer programmed to behave like you, cannot exist under your model because it cannot be tested for. Consider also that this statement is ridiculous, because you clearly do have an experience of being. What does this tell us? Empiricism and the scientific method are a philosophy…
I can generally agree that something like consciousness exists, because I seem to be experiencing it. The test of that fact is ongoing, as I type these words, and it continues to be true. I suspect, based on the fact that other people act like me and all also claim to be conscious, that they are having internal experiences similar to mine, although I can't know for sure. So I don't agree that consciousness in general…
But you can't measure it objectively. You can't tell me that other people have consciousness, you just assume it is true because they seem to be like you. You have no mechanism for determining the limits of your assumption and indeed past societies have drawn the line in even narrower constraints than "human".
Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
#69> Panpsychism gives us a way of resolving the mystery of consciousness, a way that avoids the deep difficulties that plague more conventional options.
Eh, not really. With panpsychism you end up with, e.g. human, consciousness often becoming an emergent property of complex-enough systems. But in reality, you might have systems that are quite complicated (say, more complicated than a brain even) that aren't conscious. I do think that consciousness is most likely a "foundational" property of our universe, but the argument that "everything is conscious" (even to a tiny degree) doesn't seem very useful.
Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just because the observable world is testable doesn't mean that subjectivity doesn't hold any value.
Yeah, and I never claimed that. There's plenty of value in the subjective. For example, I liked this movie more than that one. My tastes are subjective, and yet I find value in them. But this philosopher's claim isn't subjective. It's not "hey I think it would be cool if all matter were conscious." It's a pseudo-factual claim about consciousness. It's not subjective at all. It's just neither wrong nor right. It would…
In these discussions, "subjective" and "objective" are jargon. "Subjective" basically means existing only from the point of view of an observer. "Objective" means existing independently of any observations or experiences.
For example, playing a video game, there is some kind of objective physical activity occurring in reality. Subjectively, you perceive a cartoon world with Mario bouncing around on koopas. If the CPU has its own subjective experience of the very same objective physical phenomena, it probably doesn't involve the perception of Mario and koopas.
I think there is probably tremendous value in figuring out what it is about the universe that enables these different subjective experiences, when and how they arise, how they're similar and different, etc.