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Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

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Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#251

Post by Faark »

karmakaze wrote: post #214

I'm trying to be open-minded and make sense of the position. The first big leap is considering experience to be a continuum from humans down to inorganic matter. This is stretching the meaning of 'experience'. If I walk on snow, does it experience deformation, or does it just deform? The second leap is saying science only tells us what matter does and not "the intrinsic nature of matter: what matter is, in and of its…

They certainly don't have a lot of programming experience. I can see them developing something with a bunch of complexity, experiencing a bug, being unable to identify what's causing it (partially due to not having good tools), then declaring it a "intrinsic part of the program"... or "feature". Maybe not that far off after all...

The article finally lost me with "The only way we can find out about the consciousness of others is by asking them [..]". So just add the appropriate response to a sufficiently capable chat-bot and we are done? And if more is required than just a simple yes/no, the same checklist can be used to build something artificial. But since consciousness is one of the good old "you know it when you see it", we will likely shift the goal post pretty hard as AI development progresses, and mostly use the term to exclude what we achieved so far. Kind of like we stop calling something AI once we achieved the a task and use a more technical term... e.g. the many CNN's in a Tesla. Hope I get to experience much of that in my lifetime.

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#252

Post by mannykannot »

gloriousduke wrote: post #232
mannykannot wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Peronally, my response is not anything more hostile than a tendency for my eyes to roll -- and the reason for that comes from how this argument seems to be using the flexibility of language to avoid the issues. There is a problem that precedes this essay: 'consciousness' nominally has a meaning of merely being aware of, and responding to, the environment, but this is not the self-aware consciousness that is currently…

> nominally has a meaning of merely being aware of, and responding to, the environment, but this is not the self-aware consciousness that is currently unexplained By this do you mean we've explained how "what is it like to be a bat?" works? (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F ) If so, can you point me toward that explanation?

I was thinking of something simpler: the flexibility of meaning of the word 'consciousness' -- for example, in Merriam-Webster:

1a: the quality or state of being aware especially of something within oneself. (my emphasis.)

If you regard 'especially' to indicate that the emphasized clause is optional (edit: or maybe even if not), you could arguably say (and people do) that anything alive fits this definition, as do even things like thermostats. This, however, is not the consciousness that the science and philosophy of mind is concerned with: it is specifically concerned with the sort of consciousness that we exhibit, which is aware that it is an agent in the world, aware that it has this awareness, and aware that other people are also aware in this sense.

Update: I may have misunderstood your question. The nature of consciousness in other animals is also an open issue and is being studied. It would be very odd indeed if there was nothing like it in any other species, but, at the same time, no other living species on earth has it to the extent we do. I don't think these observations justify the extremely broad definitions of panpsychism, and I do not think panpsychism helps with studying these animals any more that it helps with humans.

Nagel's point is, I think, rather tangential - he is arguing that we probably will never know what it is like to be a bat, as it is likely too far from any experience we could have. I think he is probably right, and again, panpsychism will not change that.

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#254

Post by [deleted] »

karmakaze wrote: post #245
alisson wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I walk on snow, do I experience walking, or do I just walk? What is experience? If we explain experience in a way that its reactions happening in my body, maybe biochemical reactions, that could even translate into thoughts in my head, I could say that in a lower level the snow also experience reactions, physical reactions. A snowflake don't have a body to experience like we do, but it does experience something, b…

I tried following that line of reasoning. I couldn't imagine any reactions in the snow that would give rise to experience in any meaningful way distinct from merely deforming.

[deleted]

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#255

Post by turk73 »

Veedrac wrote: post #226

Panpsychism is incredibly silly. It's just obfuscated dualism. It literally doesn't explain anything , and it's obviously wrong for the simple reason that it gives no way to explain why humans act on their conscious experience and have it modelled internally as a conscious experience. The brain's use of electrical pulses or DNA doesn't result in an innate internal model of electricity or DNA. Similarly, if a proton h…

Before you discard it, consider the example of America's runaway bureaucracy. It is completely operated and dependent on humans, but somehow it has a life of its own, and intelligence of its own, and is able to ward off threats such as budget cuts, consolidation, etc. The AI we have constructed isn't just on computers, it is us.

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#256

Post by ajuc »

hasbroslasher wrote: post #219
ajuc wrote: post #9

Mu. 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’…

> 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. This has so much potential to become a semantic death trap - but let me ask if you think even human experience could be experimentally tested? If you put me in…

> What does "non-experience" even mean?

Indeed, that's why putting meaningless arbitrarily defined touchy-feely words in physics is a bad idea. But I'll try.

Experience = event that changes the model of the world you have in your brain. We can verify it experimentally by for example:

- testing if you associate a loud buzz with food before the experiment (either by looking at neurons that activate when you think of food or by looking at saliva production)

- repeatedly giving you food after buzzing

- testing again if you associate a loud buzz with food

We can deduce from that change that your internal model of the world changed to associate "buzz" with "food" so you experienced our experiment.

This isn't a definition I will defend because I don't think such definitions are that important in the first place.

Now I don't think a stone has internal model of the world, and even if it does - I don't see how can it change. But I cannot experimentally test it :)

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#257

Post by Veedrac »

keiferski wrote: post #243
Veedrac wrote: post #226

Panpsychism is incredibly silly. It's just obfuscated dualism. It literally doesn't explain anything , and it's obviously wrong for the simple reason that it gives no way to explain why humans act on their conscious experience and have it modelled internally as a conscious experience. The brain's use of electrical pulses or DNA doesn't result in an innate internal model of electricity or DNA. Similarly, if a proton h…

Panpsychism is often put forth as a solution to the dualism/physicalism problem. That is...sort of the entire point. To call it obfuscated dualism is to completely misunderstand the idea, so much so that I have a hard time believing you've read any material on the topic. This is covered in the introductory paragraph of the SEP article: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/

Panpsychism is often claimed to be a solution to these things. I've never actually seen any argument that would defend the thesis.

I say panpsychism is obfuscated dualism because it involves no causal mechanisms anywhere, and even worse its entire construction rules out there being any non-convoluted causal mechanism.

I'm not as unread on the topic as you imply. I'm no professional philosopher, but I've opened a Chalmers PDF on the topic or two.

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#258

Post by imoldtoo »

Veedrac wrote: post #218
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…

Alice: We can agree the brain is conscious, yes? Bob: Of course. Alice: But what if you scaled up all the neurons in the brain a factor of 2? Would it still be conscious? Bob: Sure, if it's the same system running the same way. There's no reason to expect it to matter. Alice: Then if it was a factor 4 larger? Bob: Absolutely. Human brains are sized as they are as a matter of evolutionary coincidence. Bird neurons are…

This scaling argument only works if the consituent molecules, atoms and particles also scale proportionally.

If you scale the system but keep one end tied down it isn't the same system.

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#259

Post by mannykannot »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #170
mannykannot wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A transistor junction does not have computational properties; it is only in aggregate that they can make a computer. Supposing that the mind is the result of neurons' inherent consciousness properties is like attributing morphine's effect as arising from its "dormitive virtue" - it does not advance our understanding.

Neurons are much more complicated that that, and indeed may do computations on their own.

I am not sure of the relevance of that here, especially as the issue is not whether a computer could be made from neurons. My point is that the premise, that the mind is a result of neurons interacting, is not predicated on a requirement that each individual neuron has 'consciousness properties', whatever they might be. I cannot see how the computational abilities of neurons invalidates my analogy to silicon computers, where the computational properties are only found in aggregations of the basic building blocks, and not in the basic blocks themselves.

Also, it seems quite plausible that an aggregation of semiconductor junctions could have the same computational abilities as a neuron. This is, in fact, an active area of R&D.

Re: Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

#260

Post by jhedwards »

Lambdanaut wrote: post #239
karmakaze wrote: post #214

I'm trying to be open-minded and make sense of the position. The first big leap is considering experience to be a continuum from humans down to inorganic matter. This is stretching the meaning of 'experience'. If I walk on snow, does it experience deformation, or does it just deform? The second leap is saying science only tells us what matter does and not "the intrinsic nature of matter: what matter is, in and of its…

> The first big leap is considering experience to be a continuum from humans down to inorganic matter. This is stretching the meaning of 'experience'. If I walk on snow, does it experience deformation, or does it just deform? This is the part where materialism has the burden of proof to explain a mechanism for how, suddenly, snow doesn't experience de-formation. You get it. You've made the logical link of connections…

I don't get this. I have an experience because I have specialized organs for delivering _information_ to a central information processing unit which can evaluate the experience in a way that is _temporally decoupled_ from the event itself. There is no such mechanism in snow, it doesn't convert "deformation" into data separately from the physical fact of its deformation.
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