241–250 of 356 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, we all have consciousness, and can therefore experiment. A lot of experiments have been done about consciousness through meditation, psychedelics, etc.
How do you know that I am conscious?
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…
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, because if not, it would not even deform.
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…
This is covered in the introductory paragraph of the SEP article:
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…
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…
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…
> 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. If panpsychism is correct, then all of our machines would already be conscious. Creating new consciousness wouldn't be possible except maybe in the sense that matter itself can be created u…
Right. In this case, the goal would be to "increase" the consciousness, rather than create it.
> What I think you're trying to say is that it might be possible to assemble machines in such a way that a combined "machine consciousness" emerges from the separate low-level consciousnesses of its components. Which may or may not happen with every machine anyway, I'm not sure how you would devise an experiment to test for this.
Essentially, yes. I meant that the model of panpsychism might serve as a useful as a blueprint to create artificial minds from the accumulation of low-level components, even if it isn't necessarily useful as a scientific model of the universe.
What I mean by that is, everyone is incredulous that stones can have the same experience as humans, but consider it the other way around: humans have essentially the same experience as stones. Both react to the physical processes happening at their peripheries in dynamically-consistent ways, i.e., computing a quasi-deterministic function. The conclusion then is that since we are conscious, there's no reason that stones couldn't also be. It's a matter of degree, encoded in the complexity of that quasi-deterministic function mentioned above.
The main difference between us and stones is that, in order for our DNA to have arisen and propagated itself this far, it had to have a strong set of skills to survive over the history of the universe. It can literally create lumps of proteins that achieve that goal. For the body of the animal, being aware of its own history by constructing a self-consistent and closed narrative arc (the 'I' that we all contend and interact with) obviously has advantages, since it would be hard to operate in society without pre-defined and agreed-upon roles, which we assume as our identity.
So the fact that we experience reality as such, with our emotional reactions and persistent self-narrative, is an evolved trait which helped the human genome become the dominant life form on Earth.
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…
> 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 theory doesn't purport to explain internal models nor awareness in any sense that we're used to it. That is a separate question. If you are looking for those answers, they will be found in how the machination of "conscious" behavior accumulates sufficient…
But you'll note that this is a harder question than the original, since it postulates more and conflicts with more evidence.
Honestly, to me, this perspective demotes consciousness to obscurity. There's nothing special about it because it's everywhere. What is interesting is an explicit awareness and accurate internal model of reality. But this is a completely separate problem to that of consciousness.