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Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#201

Post by nprateem »

Analemma_ wrote: post #187

Here’s my problem with panpsychism: I don’t understand why it isn’t immediately self-refuting via Ockham’s razor. What I mean is, my understanding is that panpsychism posits that all matter has some degree of consciousness somehow, i.e. even an atom has a little bit, humans just have a lot more. Fine. But clearly this property isn’t simply additive: panpsychists don’t argue that a Solar System-sized collection of pin…

> But clearly this property isn’t simply additive: panpsychists don’t argue that a Solar System-sized collection of ping-pong balls has more conscious experience than a human being

I think the main difficulty of this argument is that consciousness can only be experienced by the experiencer (mediation/drug-induced experiences aside). Therefore how can you tell how conscious the Solar System, a horse, mouse, atom, etc. is if you can't communicate with them to ask?

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#202

Post by ghthor »

monktastic1 wrote: post #164
fsiefken wrote: post #10

Read Bernardo Kastrup's, a Dutch computer scientist and philosopher, criticism on panpsychism: " https://www.bernardokastrup.com/p/papers.html https://iai.tv/articles/will-we-ever-understand-consciousnes... https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/emtud2/bernardo... He proposes an alternative answer for the mind-body problem; idealism instead of materialism https://www.bernardokastrup.com/p/papers.html

For some reason I enjoy trying to share intuitions for idealism. Let me try to do so here. First, notice that it's impossible to prove which metaphysics (materialism, idealism, solipsism, Last Thursdayism, simulationism...) is correct. Next, notice that the situation is even worse: you can't even assign probabilities to those possibilities without making assumptions about whatever is "outside" reality -- which are by…

I am my beloved and my beloved is I. I am you and you are me.

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#203

Post by hackinthebochs »

arnoooooo wrote: post #182
hackinthebochs wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what's special about neurons aside from the causal relationships it has with the rest of the system? If its utility to consciousness is nothing but its causal relationships then a digital replica will support consciousness just the same.

"nothing but causal relationships" is indeed all you'd need, provided they go the materialist way, i.e. that consciousness comes from specific arrangements of neurons. I don't think that makes sense, as nobody can give the slightest hint of a theory that would make that work. The reverse theory, that consciousness is primary, makes more sense to me. In that theory, the causality works the other way, and digital repli…

>In that theory, the causality works the other way, and digital replicas will not have consciousness

Why not? Digital stuff is made up of matter as well. Unless there's something special about neurons when it comes to consciousness, i.e. the conscious bits reside in neurons and nowhere else for some reason, there's reason to think non-biological structures that produce the same output would also be conscious. Any substantive theory of consciousness, materialist or not, will need to include a place for structure and dynamics, i.e. information cascades, within their theory to account for the correlations we observe between conscious states and brain structure and dynamics. But these qualities are present in a digital implementation as well.

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#204

Post by EForEndeavour »

appstateguy wrote: post #178
brazzy wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My take: consciousness is an emergent property of the system as a whole as it becomes sufficiently complex. Yes, that million people (you'd probably need more) working with pen and paper create, in combination, an additional new consciousness, albeit an absurdly slow-thinking one.

What differs this scenario from individual neurons firing together in order to make the human mind? Can you keep taking that line of thinking down to the subatomic properties of the neurons themselves? I'm guessing this is the argument for panpsychism. The emergent property of human consciousness could be seen as the culmination of all the individual parts themselves have some form of primitive consciousness.

Isn't that argument roughly as useless as attributing the ability of a watch to show time down to each individual mechanical component? It's technically true, but not very useful to elucidate what actually makes the watch a watch. For example, it sounds kind of silly to say that a single watch gear has some form of primitive time-keeping ability, or has some form of primitive ability to tell me whether I'm running late. The universe is rife with examples of emergent complexity in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#205

Post by nprateem »

dilap wrote: post #196
jhanschoo wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So the question is, this simulated brain, which is behaving very similarly indeed to a biological brain: does it have consciousness? Does it feel? I think there are more easily accessible examples that investigate this problem closer. Are animals conscious? How about children? How about very slow people?

So me it seems intuitively obvious that the answers are yes, yes, and yes. Even ants seem to have some sort of consciousness to me. But of course it's completely unknowable. Maybe every other single creature on earth is just an unfeeling automaton, and only I feel. But I doubt it. ;-)

That's exactly the sort of thing I'd expect an unfeeling automaton to write -- or even believe -- to try to trick me into thinking it has feelings

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#206

Post by alacer »

I tend to think consciousness is universally fundamental and effectively intrinsic, since all we can know is our experience that requires it. That's why we can never get behind consciousness, as noted by Max Plank in 1931. (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Max_Planck)

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#207

Post by memling »

shkkmo wrote: post #189
keiferski wrote: post #73

Heh, 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 philosoph…

> virtually no one is positing that a rock is conscious in the same way a human being is. Well, I would argue that virtually no human is actually conscious in the way we tend to posit that humans are conscious. I think we tend to underestimate the link between our understanding of our experience of consciousness and how memory formation and recall works. Our own experience of our consciousness is as much an illusions…

> Our own experience of our consciousness is as much an illusions as our experience of the world. When we consider and attempt to discuss our own experience of redness, we are generally left with only our memory of that experience which influenced be a great deal of post-processing, compression and abstraction. I believe the mental states in which you can actually experience pure redness is very different from the state in which you can attempt analyze and discuss that experience.

How do you know that your experimentation that reveals this disconnect isn't subject to the same problem?

I'm not sure how to word it artfully, but I mean the question sincerely: how do we avoid invoking turtles-all-the-down?

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#208

Post by willtim »

dilap wrote: post #27

An 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…

> 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.)

The laws of physics start to become relevant here. It is quite likely that it is not possible to simulate a human brain using a classical computer, at least not at any kind of speed such that it can experience the world as we do.

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#209

Post by grok2 »

codeulike wrote: post #195
adwn wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To build on your thought experiment: > So the question is, this simulated brain, which is behaving very similarly indeed to a biological brain: does it have consciousness? Does it feel? If you answer "yes" to this question, what happens if you split the computations of that simulated brain over a million people equipped with pen and paper? Where is its consciousness happening now? I have yet to hear a satisfying answ…

I have yet to hear a satisfying answer from anyone ... 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 rep…

Maybe the consciousness of a baby is different from that of an adult and the baby has barely any consciousness? I guess everything depends on what you define as "consciousness".

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#210

Post by BurningFrog »

adwn wrote: post #90
dilap wrote: post #27

An 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…

To build on your thought experiment: > So the question is, this simulated brain, which is behaving very similarly indeed to a biological brain: does it have consciousness? Does it feel? If you answer "yes" to this question, what happens if you split the computations of that simulated brain over a million people equipped with pen and paper? Where is its consciousness happening now? I have yet to hear a satisfying answ…

> I have yet to hear a satisfying explanation of consciousness from anyone...

So it's not surprising if we struggle to answer "Can machines be X?", when X is undefined.

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