And to think that I used to have great respect for Scientific American magazine. This article is the worst sort of pseudo-intellectual tripe. It uses fancy-schmancy academic language to dress up silly ideas and wordplay. Masking itself in the facade of reasonableness to make hand-wavy conjecture and baseless assertions. Moreover, many of the supporting points made by Goff are simply wrong, betraying his ignorance of our current understanding of nature. I'm saddened that SA has published this.
Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
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Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
#72Mu. The definition provided ("consciousness is experience") explains nothing, you cannot experimentally decide if atoms experience anything, the fact that they do or don't doesn't change any prediction for how they behave over time. It's meaningless, like wondering if magic exists but is actively hiding from us. Paranoia is that way. > Despite great progress in our scientific understanding of the brain, we still don’…
> So it is conscious but we know where it comes from - it comes from the computational power and interactions with the world it can do. How little computational ability is required to define something as conscious? Even a brick reacts to stimuli, albeit in the same completely predictable (to our high-powered brains) way that a simple robot does.
My point exactly. Why is Mercury a planet and Pluto isn't? Because we arbitrarily decided on the threshold. Universe doesn't care, there's nothing in the laws of physics about Pluto or planets it's just a special case we focus on.
Let me try another definition:
Consciousness is a feedback loop we can empathize with.
Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
#73Heh, that's a funny coincidence. I was just reading about panpsychism (and some variations of it) earlier today, specifically this article on forgotten philosopher James Ward:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/james-ward/
It seems really alien to our current mental metaphysical model, but if you study the subject and analyze the arguments, it's not as absurd as it seems. It's important to realize that when philosophers use the word "conscious" they don't generally mean "awake" or "aware" in a human-sense; virtually no one is positing that a rock is conscious in the same way a human being is.
Perhaps the main reason why panpsychism fell out of favor among philosophers and philosophers of science in the last century is due to the increased popularity of positivism and the linguistic turn. I'm not sure if panpsychism is necessarily a path forward in terms of describing the universe, but I think it seems promising in terms of a prescriptive use of creating, or attempting to create, new consciousness with machines.
Further reading:
Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
#74Why so much dislike for this? It's a theory that pushes on some of the foundational assumptions we make. Maybe it resonates and maybe not. But just being open to a new set of ideas means we can maybe learn something new and interesting. Or not and that's fine too. People seem angry that someone else would talk about an idea they don't currently agree with.
Because there are a lot of scientific wackos that are trying to push it to mainstream without any proof, see e.g. PhDs in congnitive neuroscience with focus on art and whole conferences organized around such ideas. It looks like some New Age cult inside science. Whether it's true or not, there is no methodology how to measure it, putting it outside scientific domain. It's on the level of simulation hypothesis. The ra…
There's an assumption that consciousness must be a result of emergent properties. I am not sure something like that has been definitively proven.
I think there will never be a proof of consciousness that will satisfy the standards set by scientific experimentation.
Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
#75> Does Consciousness Pervade the Universe?
NO!
> Where does consciousness come from?
Emergent properties of a functional brain.
Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
#76This is the exact wrong direction we should take if we want to have any hope of understanding consciousness. Rather than pass a bong around and declare the whole universe is conscious, we should question the consciousness even of entities whose consciousness we currently take for granted. We should ask: is it really true that all humans are conscious[1], or is there something specific that triggers consciousness? For…
Here is an interesting opinion of an AI researcher on consciousness. He basically claims that it is inevitable for an agent that can not store all information that it encounters and therefore needs to compress it. One of the most important things that needs to be represented is the agent itself, leading to self-symbols as he calls them. Correct me please if I summarized the comment incorrectly. https://old.reddit.com…
Discussing consciousness can be really difficult because the word is used in different ways in everyday language.
Consciousness defined as the intrinsically subjective quality of experience (Qualia [0]) is what is considered impossibly difficult to explain (maybe even necessarily outside of the scopy of natural science) by some. It's also what makes some people consider the crazy out-there ideas seriously...
Anyway, my point is, explaining self-symbols that an agent uses to model its own role in the world is a completely different problem. Some people use the term "hard problem of consciousness" [1] to distinguish the former from the latter.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
#77Honestly “consciousness” is not a good term for this phenomenon. It is much more “observeness”, and here is why. If we suppose that not all things have such a property, these things can still be complex enough to exhibit the behavior similar to those who have it. E.g. someone who is me could not have it, could simply exist and write this message, but “real me” would mot be a thing. I can imagine other people, but I’m not them. What happens when I die? There still are other people. Now switch me with any of them and you’ve got a world without “me”.
The phenomenon is real, as we can detect it with an intelligence and discuss (otherwise no one would understand me). But it is not necessary, nor provable that it drives our behavior or it feels and experiences events. It observes us, we observe it and this observer meta-identifies with a body that is aware of the idea, like a fixed point in calculus. So (imo) it is not a physical control, feedback or consciousness, but a symbiosis of physical and “observing“.
Anyway, I can’t see why we should dismiss it and move on, like some people suggest. It may be a key to something important about reality.
Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
#78An 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.
As a neuroscientist, I have the opposite intuition. If we swap out one Neuron with a digital version you’ll be the same person. Do that 84B times and at the end of the day I see absolutely no reason why you would lose consciousness or sense of self.
Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
#79Even 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…
Even if two theories make the exact same predictions, believing or giving more attention to one or the other can change how the brain operates, making it more or less efficient at some tasks and eliciting different emotions.
For example, the interpretation of natural numbers as sets in set theory and as strings of decimal digits is equivalent and gives the same results, however for most people seeing numbers as naturally being strings of decimal digits is likely to make them faster at doing arithmetic and making decisions based on numbers.
Likewise, seeing other people as conscious or unconscious results in the same predictions about their behavior, but seeing them as conscious might make most people more efficient at cooperation with other people.
In this case, seeing all matter as conscious might make someone feel less special, and thus have less attachment to their identity and spend less effort acting in a way that preserves it.
Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism
#80Why so much dislike for this? It's a theory that pushes on some of the foundational assumptions we make. Maybe it resonates and maybe not. But just being open to a new set of ideas means we can maybe learn something new and interesting. Or not and that's fine too. People seem angry that someone else would talk about an idea they don't currently agree with.
Yes, I think anything that “sounds like” science but is pretty clearly not measurable or verifiable gets treated with harsh ridicule. This is really a very different philosophical take on our own self importance in the universe. In western philosophy consciousness has been the pervasive thing that “makes us better” than everything else on the planet. (This is true even biblically if you think about it). The idea that…
> I think the idea exists already to some extent.
It's almost as if we've always known the true nature of our consciousness, we just keep overlooking it :)