Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

I'm not sure if you're implying I do or not, but to clarify, I don't deny there is something we believe to be an experience of consciousness. I just don't believe it is any more real than a computer, or to use your example, a zombie claiming consciousness.

> I think what you are getting at is the zombie concept. This is where we construct a being which has sensory inputs and actions, and behaves like a human, but isn’t actually conscious. Distinguishing zombies from real consciousness is supposed to highlight the difficulty in detecting or measuring consciousness. But, by definition the zombie doesn’t have any subjective experience. As soon as you introduce that, you are really saying the zombie is conscious.

Yes, I think we are "zombies" who truly believe from their programming that they are human with a conscious experience of their selfs. I think this belief is evolutionarily important because it might be the only thing that stops pain being morally irrelevant. Or at the very least, it makes us believe the pain of a conscious entity is worth considering.

They will also go on internet forums arguing that while they, of course, do have consciousness - the digital replicas of themselves would not!

Here's Dennett on this very subject, about 20 years ago. In Consciousness Explained he imagines what a Turing Test conversation between a human 'judge' and a 'Chinese Room' might look like:

Judge: Did you hear about the Irishman who found a magic lamp? When he rubbed it a genie appeared and granted him three wishes. “I’ll have a pint of Guiness!” the Irishman replied and immediately it appeared. The Irishman eagerly set to sipping and then gulping, but the level of Guiness in the glass was always magically restored. After a while the genie became impatient. “Well, what about your second wish?” he asked. Replied the Irishman between gulps, “Oh well, I guess I’ll have another one of these.”

CHINESE ROOM: Very funny. No, I hadn’t heard it– but you know I find ethnic jokes in bad taste. I laughed in spite of myself, but really, I think you should find other topics for us to discuss.

J: Fair enough but I told you the joke because I want you to explain it to me.

CR: Boring! You should never explain jokes.

J: Nevertheless, this is my test question. Can you explain to me how and why the joke “works”?

CR: If you insist. You see, it depends on the assumption that the magically refilling glass will go on refilling forever, so the Irishman has all the stout he can ever drink. So he hardly has a reason for wanting a duplicate but he is so stupid (that’s the part I object to) or so besotted by the alcohol that he doesn’t recognize this, and so, unthinkingly endorsing his delight with his first wish come true, he asks for seconds. These background assumptions aren’t true, of course, but just part of the ambient lore of joke-telling, in which we suspend our disbelief in magic and so forth. By the way we could imagine a somewhat labored continuation in which the Irishman turned out to be “right” in his second wish after all, perhaps he’s planning to throw a big party and one glass won’t refill fast enough to satisfy all his thirsty guests (and it’s no use saving it up in advance– we all know how stale stout loses its taste). We tend not to think of such complications which is part of the explanation of why jokes work. Is that enough?

Dennett: “The fact is that any program that could actually hold up its end in the conversation depicted would have to be an extraordinary supple, sophisticated, and multilayered system, brimming with “world knowledge” and meta-knowledge and meta-meta-knowledge about its own responses, the likely responses of its interlocutor, and much, much more…. Maybe the billions of actions of all those highly structured parts produce genuine understanding in the system after all.”

His point (if I need to re-explain it?) is that the Chinese Room argument is superficially compelling. But if you actually follow through and imagine the Chinese Room doing the things that the thought experiment defines it to be doing, then you get a picture of an extraordinarily complicated system, and the nuts and bolts of exactly what that system is running on fall away into irrelevance.

"Do not judge, or you will be judged. For with the same judgment you pronounce, you will be judged; and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you." (Matthew 7:1-2)

"For whoever does the will of My Father in heaven is My brother and sister and mother." (Matthew 12:50)

"Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of Mine, you did for Me." (Matthew 25:40)

There's a riddle in the Gospel of Thomas[1]:

"Make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside."

Here's an interpretation: "inside" and "outside" refer to the inner world and the outer world.

These share some qualities or aspects, both are known only subjectively, and there's a similarity of form (there are e.g. red triangles in both worlds) and susceptibility to will (we can move our bodies and we can affect what we imagine, aka the faculty of imagination. Both of these abilities present the same problem: what is intention and how does it relate to will to cause changes in perception?)

Otherwise they are very different. The outer world is made of matter/energy in various configurations and, while we don't (yet) know what the inner world is made of, it's obviously very different than matter/energy. Perhaps the main difference is that you can more-or-less manipulate the contents of imagination (I'm using the word here as a proxy for the whole of internal world) "at will" but the contents of the real world obey a physics that dictates that you more-or-less have to push things with other things to get anything in particular to happen (please forgive my gross simplification.)

Now consider the subjective experience of an omnipotent, omniscient being. If you can know and alter the "outer" world just as easily as you can know and alter the "inner" world, wouldn't they effectively be the same?

In the context of a Gnostic tradition, I think it means that, when one unifies the self with the Self the "real" world and the "imaginary" world also become one.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Thomas