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Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

nautil.us

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Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#81

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

skissane wrote: post #69
mrec wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Muddle-headed confusion" is harsh. I'd prefer something like "human intuition not being particularly reliable on questions it wasn't evolved for". If preserving a sense of profound mystery is your goal then... honestly, that mindset is sufficiently alien to me that I can't really think of anything useful to say on the subject. I can understand and share it as an aesthetic choice - mysteries are cool! - but not as a…

Maybe "Why am I I?" is an expression of dissatisfaction at being trapped in the prison of the self. That I only get to experience my experiences, and not other people's. Maybe the answer to the question then is not a proposition, but a liberation from that prison. If one is a religious believer, one might hope for that liberation after death. If one is a transhumanist (which is maybe just a different sort of religion…

Here's an answer: You experience your own experience because it is the only way to understand what it is to be you. If you also experienced the experiences of others, you would understand instead what it means to be that amalgamation of experience.

We know that a human being can survive with large portions of their brain missing. Entire hemispheres in fact. You understand what it is to be the amalgamation of experiences from both hemispheres, but the hemispheres don't understand what it is to be that experience, they only know the experience of being a hemisphere.

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#83

Post by brodie »

gotocake wrote: post #53
mrec wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there are many other options beyond just materialism and Cartesian dualism Can you give some examples of the kind of options you're thinking of? I mean, I have a lot of time for functionalist accounts, and given Sufficiently Smart Technology (tm) I'm happy to allow for the possibility of something recognizably "me" being artificially duplicated in a different physical substrate. (After which we'd rapidly start dive…

But GGP's question was specifically about being born. I really struggle to imagine how someone born somewhere else, somewhen else, could be "me" with anything like the fidelity I think our intuition demands. And if you loosen your identity test to the point where it could, doesn't it then become useless as an individuation test, in that lots of people could be sufficiently like me all at the same time? Up front let m…

Based on my own personal experience of putting myself in a position of dying now probably more times than I can count (unfortunately), I've been seriously wondering if the universe does contain all of my deaths as well, but my consciousness stays on a path where it can continue, because that's all it can do.

Though that still raises the question of why this particular set of living experiences and not others.

Also, if this sort of thing is the case, I think it would make being a moral person significantly more complex. You would need to not only make moral decisions, but create as many moral possible universes as possible and shut out the immoral universes from existence by not creating paths to them. Though I guess that would make me a highly immoral person at this point (causing pain and suffering in all the universes where I've died), though I do try to be moral in this universe as much as I can.

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#84

Post by paraschopra »

Panpsychism is exciting. But there are two problems in it. One is the combination problem: what sort of collection of atoms are conscious and what are not. If you propose then that only agents or complex systems are conscious, you are faced with the second problem: the boundary condition. What do you call an agent, and why?

I’m ultimately hopeful that subjective experience will come to be seen as something fundamental. But the difficulty is that we can’t just make up new entities / concepts in the world that don’t agree with current scientific facts. So such a science of consciousness has to be compatible with modern findings of neuroscience and psychophysics.

It’s exciting times! Let’s hope that we’re able to get a grip on this question of why we have this subjective experience of red colour.

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#85

Post by wwarner »

Nice interview with Phillip Goff on CBC Ideas: https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.4822151 . He reiterates B Russell's point: The least extraordinary thing we know is that we're aware of nature, and we're made of the same natural substances that make up the external world. Therefore the extraordinary claim is that there can be no consciousness outside of the body. In other words, it requires extraordinary evidence. He makes the conventional dismissive attitude sound pretty chauvanistic. It's a good interview.

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#87

Post by jacobsimon »

wwarner wrote: post #85

Nice interview with Phillip Goff on CBC Ideas: https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.4822151 . He reiterates B Russell's point: The least extraordinary thing we know is that we're aware of nature, and we're made of the same natural substances that make up the external world. Therefore the extraordinary claim is that there can be no consciousness outside of the body. In other words, it requires extraordinary evidence. He makes the…

I think opinions like these ignore the immense complexity of the animal brain compared to other natural materials. We are not made of the same stuff as the rest of the external world—living things have a very precise configuration of cells and connections, and the slightest deficiencies or disturbances lead to complete loss of consciousness

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#88

Post by trixie_ »

paraschopra wrote: post #84

Panpsychism is exciting. But there are two problems in it. One is the combination problem: what sort of collection of atoms are conscious and what are not. If you propose then that only agents or complex systems are conscious, you are faced with the second problem: the boundary condition. What do you call an agent, and why? I’m ultimately hopeful that subjective experience will come to be seen as something fundamenta…

I think panpsychism argues that everything is conscious, at all levels, simultaneously. There are no boundaries. What you experience as a boundary is just the limit of your awareness. Just as you don't consciously beat your heart or heal your wounds. And if you think about it a lot it's tough to really tell where your own boundary brain/body ends and the environment begins.

I like the panpsychism stuff because it resolves some other problems as well 'the transporter problem' - are you the same person after transporting star trek style? Under panpsychism it doesn't matter because you are unawarely everything anyways.

Also the 'the split problem' - say I separated you atom by atom to create two new people with half your parts - which one would you be? or both simultanously? or none? Panpsychism makes answering these questions easy as it argues that you are unawarely both.

A lot of people are trying to explain how we are discreet entities that arise from non-discreet pieces. Trying to figure out where boundaries end/begin. When do you become conscious. What is conscious and what is not. The paysychism theory explains all these things in the other direction by saying nothing is discreet. The sense of discreetness may as well be an evolutionary illusion for the survival of my bag of atoms.

Who knows what is true though, it'd be a breakthrough if there were a way to experimentally validate any of these theories..

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#89

Post by kwccoin »

Let us reduce this to a simpler question. Can Matter detect i.e. collapse quantum wave? If it is conscious but cannot even detect quantum event, is it really conscious? As this is physical event we can check, we can at least determine that.

Re: Is Matter Conscious? (2017)

#90

Post by lisper »

paraschopra wrote: post #84

Panpsychism is exciting. But there are two problems in it. One is the combination problem: what sort of collection of atoms are conscious and what are not. If you propose then that only agents or complex systems are conscious, you are faced with the second problem: the boundary condition. What do you call an agent, and why? I’m ultimately hopeful that subjective experience will come to be seen as something fundamenta…

We humans draw this boundary all the time. We do it based on an entity's I/O behavior, and in particular, the complexity of interactions that it is possible to have with it.

Agency is not a binary quantity. A normal adult human is an agent, and a blastocyst is not, but there is no bright line where agency is bestowed. It happens gradually.

None of this is a deep mystery. The only thing that is mysterious is how the transition happens. But panpsychism is just absurd.

Just out of curiosity, why did you pick "red color" as your canonical example of subjective experience? The reason I ask is that it seems to pop up much more often than random chance would predict.

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