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This channel has lots of content on this topic. Including interviews with all the top people. https://www.youtube.com/c/CloserToTruthTV/videos To me it seems like consciousness can only be passed from one being to another. And since we are all just a collection of cells, and everything that we are is coded inside a cell. It seems to me that consciousness must exist at the cellular level.
I have one problem with consciousness is everywhere argument. Namely, if everything down to ants is conscious - how lucky are we to end up experiencing the world as humans? The chances are just too small for me to accept it at face value.
I personally think that trying to understand "consciousness" should be deferred in favor of trying to understand "common sense", or "how to avoid doing bad stuff in the next few seconds". Once we have a handle on that basic survival mechanism, seen in all mammals, then we might be able to address consciousness. Also, we could build robots able to keep themselves out of trouble. Biggest unsolved AI problem right now. It's the basic reason computers do stupid stuff sometimes.
Trying to understand "consciousness" without the ability to emulate basic common sense results in philosophical tail-chasing. There's a lot of that around.
I got too much of this going through Stanford CS in the mid-1980s. This was during the "expert systems" period, just about when expert systems turned out not to be that useful. The philosophers were still in charge. One exam question was "Does a rock have intention?", which gives a sense of where the faculty was coming from back then.
(The reviewer meant "adduce", not "abduce". "Abduce" is just moving your limbs outward. The muscles that power such movements are called abductors.)
Sam Harris' thoughts on free will in his books, app, and podcast transformed the way I think about consciousness. Alan Watts talked about the consciousness of a daffodil, and that too had a profound impact on my feelings about myself and the universe.
If you think free will exists, listen to Sam Harris's 1 hour series of audio on the topic. It will change your mind.
I wish we taught introspection and self-examination in public schools.
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2019/11/04/71-p...
Mindscape is the absolute best science, philosophy and culture podcast I've found so far.
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Can you clarify? You find the probability that you are human, conditional on already being human, to be too small to accept?
Not quite - I find the hypothesis for "consciousness is everywhere" to be too hard to accept based on the observation that I ended up as human (assuming that humans are somehow "higher" than other being of course). Or stated a bit fancier - the p-value of the null "consciousness is everywhere" is astronomically small, given this observation of me ending up as a human.
Ants might be conscious but that doesn't mean that they count as anthropic observers.
The probability that you are someone who is capable of asking the question you've asked is 1.
I have been hearing about Koch, and Tononi, and panpsychism, and phi for years now, in these articles summarizing consciousness for laymen, (a group that includes me). And these very long articles bloviate but never go any further than giving a facile description of phi, claiming that this IIT "theory" is testable, and then not saying how it could be tested. The articles from five years ago and this one seem intercha…
For Scott Aaronson's take on "Integrated Information Theory": https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799
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I completely agree, and would only point out that the ability to get far on properly calibrated bullshit is a well established phenomenon throughout human history.
But then the onus is on those who sense it to point out said bullshit.
By what possible commonly agreed upon definition could consciousness be equal to experience? The only result of accepting that definition would be having to invent a new name for what I (and I believe many with me) call consciousness, as badly defined as it is. To put it in the words of Syndrome: if everything is conscious, nothing is.
I think what you're using as a counter argument is really a foundation of buddhist emptiness or vedanta brahman. i.e. that the percieved duality is an illusion
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I completely agree, and would only point out that the ability to get far on properly calibrated bullshit is a well established phenomenon throughout human history.
But then the onus is on those who sense it to point out said bullshit.