Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

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&#x2F;baby brain and let it grow up, or somehow clone an existing brain...tricky no doubt, but again, in principle solvable.)<p>So the question is, this simulated brain, which is behaving very similarly indeed to a biological brain: does it have consciousness? Does it feel?<p>On the one hand, you might argue of course not, it’s just a computer; computers “obviously” don’t have feelings. It’s just bunch of bits. A precise collection of patterns of electrical charges evolving in time according to rigid rules.<p>On the other hand, is our own biological brain any different? We don’t think of a few cells as having consciousness, but somehow the broader collection does. Can the biological substrate of the complex arrangements really matter?<p>Maybe consciousness is like a “soul”, it’s a completely untestable, untouchable “ghost” that can inhabit anything. So maybe everything really does feel, in its own way? Maybe my computer <i>already</i> has some form of consciousness...

Heh, that&#x27;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: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plato.stanford.edu&#x2F;entries&#x2F;james-ward&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plato.stanford.edu&#x2F;entries&#x2F;james-ward&#x2F;</a><p>It seems really alien to our current mental metaphysical model, but if you study the subject and analyze the arguments, it&#x27;s not as absurd as it seems. It&#x27;s important to realize that when philosophers use the word &quot;conscious&quot; they don&#x27;t generally mean &quot;awake&quot; or &quot;aware&quot; in a human-sense; virtually no one is positing that a rock is conscious in the same way a human being is.<p>Perhaps the main reason why panpsychism fell out of favor among philosophers and philosophers of science in the last century is due to the increased popularity of positivism and the linguistic turn. I&#x27;m not sure if panpsychism is necessarily a path forward in terms of <i>describing the universe</i>, but I think it seems promising in terms of a <i>prescriptive</i> use of creating, or attempting to create, new consciousness with machines.<p>Further reading:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Panpsychism" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Panpsychism</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plato.stanford.edu&#x2F;entries&#x2F;panpsychism&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plato.stanford.edu&#x2F;entries&#x2F;panpsychism&#x2F;</a>

Another point to make on panpsychism: how do people who reject the theory explain hierarchical life? To what level is a human conscious if its component cells aren&#x27;t? Are ant colonies &quot;conscious&quot; due to the complexity of the behavior of the ants? Does that make ants less conscious? To an alien visitor, ant colonies can be considered single organisms, because they act with intent toward a specific goal and react to specific stimuli in semi-predictable ways. Extend this to human nation-states: is the USA &quot;conscious&quot;? It certainly has motivations, and a drive for self-preservation, and exerts directed will. Even if the component humans are not explicitly &quot;aware&quot; of the &quot;thoughts&quot; of the USA, can you disqualify consciousness?<p>Honestly, to me, this perspective demotes consciousness to obscurity. There&#x27;s nothing special about it because it&#x27;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.

Read Bernardo Kastrup&#x27;s, a Dutch computer scientist and philosopher, criticism on panpsychism: &quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bernardokastrup.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;papers.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bernardokastrup.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;papers.html</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;iai.tv&#x2F;articles&#x2F;will-we-ever-understand-consciousness-auid-1288" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;iai.tv&#x2F;articles&#x2F;will-we-ever-understand-consciousnes...</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;philosophy&#x2F;comments&#x2F;emtud2&#x2F;bernardo_kastrup_on_consciousness_panpsychisms&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;philosophy&#x2F;comments&#x2F;emtud2&#x2F;bernardo...</a><p>He proposes an alternative answer for the mind-body problem; idealism instead of materialism <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bernardokastrup.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;papers.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bernardokastrup.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;papers.html</a>

Why so much dislike for this? It&#x27;s a theory that pushes on some of the foundational assumptions we make. Maybe it resonates and maybe not. But just being open to a new set of ideas means we can maybe learn something new and interesting. Or not and that&#x27;s fine too. People seem angry that someone else would talk about an idea they don&#x27;t currently agree with.

I&#x27;m trying to be open-minded and make sense of the position.<p>The first big leap is considering experience to be a continuum from humans down to inorganic matter. This is stretching the meaning of &#x27;experience&#x27;. If I walk on snow, does it experience deformation, or does it just deform?<p>The second leap is saying science only tells us what matter does and not &quot;the intrinsic nature of matter: what matter is, in and of itself.&quot; I can&#x27;t see how this gets you anywhere, you can say it&#x27;s anything and it&#x27;s self-satisfying.<p>The Hollywood ending really lost me. Let&#x27;s just sweep this consciousness problem into a tiny tiny place and call it intrinsic: &quot;So it turns out that there is a huge hole in our scientific story. The proposal of the panpsychist is to put consciousness in that hole. Consciousness, for the panpsychist, is the intrinsic nature of matter.&quot;

Mu. The definition provided (&quot;consciousness is experience&quot;) explains nothing, you cannot experimentally decide if atoms experience anything, the fact that they do or don&#x27;t doesn&#x27;t change any prediction for how they behave over time. It&#x27;s meaningless, like wondering if magic exists but is actively hiding from us. Paranoia is that way.<p>&gt; Despite great progress in our scientific understanding of the brain, we still don’t have even the beginnings of an explanation of how complex electrochemical signaling is somehow able to give rise to the inner subjective world of colors, sounds, smells and tastes that each of us knows in our own case. There is a deep mystery in understanding how what we know about ourselves from the inside fits together with what science tells us about matter from the outside.<p>We can make a very simple robot that reacts to the environment - for example follows light and learns where the walls are so as not to collide with them in the future.<p>It checks all the boxes that simple life does - if you say that a bacteria experience world then so does that robot. So it is conscious but we know where it comes from - it comes from the computational power and interactions with the world it can do. There&#x27;s no magical spiritualism around it, it&#x27;s just nested if-then-elses + memory + feedback. Which btw is as good a definition for consciousness as any other. When you become unconscious the feedback loop is interrupted.<p>&gt; “Of course, you can’t do that. I designed physical science to deal with quantities, not qualities.”<p>&quot;Quantity has a quality of its own&quot;. There&#x27;s no qualities in the universe, just quantities and we arbitrarily assign labels (qualities) to them.<p>In the end I think &quot;is X conscious&quot; is as productive a question as &quot;is Pluto a planet&quot; or &quot;can submarines swim&quot;.

Am I the only one who thinks the consciousness question is really quite easy to understand and answer?<p>The illusion of consciousness is obviously beneficial. For example, I could tell a computer, through the use of sensors, to report that it&#x27;s in pain when it&#x27;s hit. But you wouldn&#x27;t take it seriously, or care for its suffering, because it hasn&#x27;t also declared that it is under the illusion that its suffering has a kind of physical manifestation in its mind.<p>The reason we care more about animals today than in the past is because we finally began to question whether or not they had a similar sense of self as us - perhaps when we are cruel to animals they don&#x27;t just know they&#x27;re in pain and understand like a computer might that pain is bad, but their brains actually tell them they are physically feeling a sensation of pain. Similarly, I presume if an AI ever said it had a similar physical experience of pain to us then we would considering treating that AI with similar regard to that of a human.<p>If I&#x27;m correct, then an illusion of consciousness makes complete evolutionary sense. It&#x27;s not really consciousness, but a sense of self, and more importantly, a sense that there are others with a similar sense of self to our own.<p>Our consciousness is just our brains saying you&#x27;re a real thing that thinks and feels. It&#x27;s a lie our brain tells us that our pain and the pain of others is important and worth caring about.

There&#x27;s an interesting podcast where Philip Goff and Sean Carroll discuss about various aspects of panpsychism. Sean plays a very good devil&#x27;s advocate, so if you enjoy a nice friendly critic of the above ideas, I highly recommend this episode!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.preposterousuniverse.com&#x2F;podcast&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;04&#x2F;71-philip-goff-on-consciousness-everywhere&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.preposterousuniverse.com&#x2F;podcast&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;04&#x2F;71-p...</a>

Is the progression toward the heat death of the universe a result of innumerable suffering particles steering themselves in ways that minimize their pain? Should we as humans accelerate the heat death of the universe to end subatomic suffering?<p>Or is gravity their preferred route? Being together. Maybe the answer is funneling all of the universe into black holes.<p>Diamonds are very stable. Does this mean their particles are very happy? Is converting your loved one&#x27;s remains into diamonds the greatest thing you can do for them, or is this reasoning flawed and is the eternal stasis a bad thing?

Consciousness is obviously a property of the universe <i>somehow</i>, or else humans couldn&#x27;t have it in the first place, since we&#x27;re part of the universe.<p>I&#x27;ve long assumed it has to be something that appears qualitatively like magnetism -- no large-scale effects in most materials, but when small-scale elements of certain types are configured&#x2F;aligned in certain ways, <i>presto</i> it appears. And that brains evolved such a configuration because consciousness must have conferred certain evolutionary benefits.<p>But it&#x27;s not clear to me whether that is considered panpsychism, though. Because it doesn&#x27;t imply that e.g. rocks have any meaningful level of &quot;consciousness&quot; any more than most rocks would be considered magnetic.

I think non-duality &#x2F; advaita makes much more sense than panpsychism, as it requires less assumptions while remaining compatible with our experience.<p>Panpsychism seems like a bandaid to solve the hard problem of consciousness, which non-duality does not suffer from.

It all rests on what your definition of consciousness is.<p>Philip: &gt; But when I use the word consciousness, I simply mean experience: pleasure, pain, visual or auditory experience, et cetera.<p>But that just kicks the can again. What is &quot;experience&quot;? What is pain versus pleasure?<p>Ultimately we have to arrive at a reductionist definition that doesn&#x27;t reference undefined terms. After many years of thinking about this problem, here&#x27;s my best shot:<p><i>Experience</i> is equivalent to state change, e.g. the state change induced in a thermometer or a radio receiver due to stimuli. <i>Consciousness</i> is ultimately a system of modeling that is complex enough to have developed a model of itself, thus &quot;realizing&quot; that the system is separate from the environment that produces stimuli.<p>Humans arrived at consciousness through evolving larger and larger brains whose main goal is to model the environment and behavior of other individuals in order to predict what will happen next, in order to make plans for survival.<p>Panpsychism is then scientific, and perhaps inescapable, if we use these definitions. But, it doesn&#x27;t mean that rocks and black holes are conscious. Only those things that undergo state change in response to stimuli and are complex enough to have models of themselves. There is no evidence that rocks have information-processing capabilities at all, and worms&#x27; brains are too small to have a model of themselves, however simplified.

Panpsychism is interesting but I&#x27;m not convinced.<p>If I can summarise the idea it&#x27;s answering the question &quot;how can consciousness arise from unconscious matter (like the human brain)&quot; with &quot;it can&#x27;t, matter is already conscious (i.e. it has conscious experience)&quot;.<p>It&#x27;s a very simple explanation, a very Occamist explanation. But at the same time it is not _really_ an explanation. It just pushes the question back from &quot;how can complex matter like the human brain be conscious?&quot; to &quot;how can simple matter like quarks be conscious?&quot;. But panpsychism does not even attempt to answer the further question- it&#x27;s simply ignored. That is, panpsychism says that &quot;matter is conscious&quot; but it doesn&#x27;t say _why_ matter is conscious, or what exactly consciousness _is_ after all. It just passes the buck.<p>So it&#x27;s not very different than answering the question with &quot;because God willed it&quot;. I mean, that&#x27;s an answer too. It&#x27;s a metaphysical answer- but so what? Panpsychism is not metaphysical but it&#x27;s not more explanatory than God. Not until it explains _what_ consciousness is and _why_ quarks have it.

Honestly “consciousness” is not a good term for this phenomenon. It is much more “observeness”, and here is why. If we suppose that not all things have such a property, these things can still be complex enough to exhibit the behavior similar to those who have it. E.g. someone who is me could not have it, could simply exist and write this message, but “real me” would mot be a thing. I can imagine other people, but I’m not them. What happens when I die? There still are other people. Now switch me with any of them and you’ve got a world without “me”.<p>The phenomenon is real, as we can detect it with an intelligence and discuss (otherwise no one would understand me). But it is not necessary, nor provable that <i>it</i> drives our behavior or <i>it</i> feels and experiences events. It observes us, we observe it and this observer meta-identifies with a body that is aware of the idea, like a fixed point in calculus. So (imo) it is not a physical control, feedback or consciousness, but a symbiosis of physical and “observing“.<p>Anyway, I can’t see why we should dismiss it and move on, like some people suggest. It may be a key to something important about reality.

ORT (Only Read Title)<p>There&#x27;s a riddle in the Gospel of Thomas[1]:<p>&quot;Make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside.&quot;<p>Here&#x27;s an interpretation: &quot;inside&quot; and &quot;outside&quot; refer to the inner world and the outer world.<p>These share some qualities or aspects, both are known only subjectively, and there&#x27;s a similarity of form (there are e.g. red triangles in both worlds) and susceptibility to will (we can move our bodies <i>and</i> we can affect what we imagine, aka the faculty of imagination. Both of these abilities present the same problem: what is intention and how does it relate to will to cause changes in perception?)<p>Otherwise they are very different. The outer world is made of matter&#x2F;energy in various configurations and, while we don&#x27;t (yet) know what the inner world is made of, it&#x27;s obviously very different than matter&#x2F;energy. Perhaps the main difference is that you can more-or-less manipulate the contents of imagination (I&#x27;m using the word here as a proxy for the whole of internal world) &quot;at will&quot; but the contents of the real world obey a physics that dictates that you more-or-less have to push things with other things to get anything in particular to happen (please forgive my gross simplification.)<p>Now consider the <i>subjective</i> experience of an omnipotent, omniscient being. If you can know and alter the &quot;outer&quot; world just as easily as you can know and alter the &quot;inner&quot; world, wouldn&#x27;t they effectively be the same?<p>In the context of a Gnostic tradition, I think it means that, when one unifies the self with the Self the &quot;real&quot; world and the &quot;imaginary&quot; world also become one.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Gospel_of_Thomas" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Gospel_of_Thomas</a>

Sabine Hossenfelder&#x27;s opinion on pan-psychism and why it can&#x27;t be true from a physics standpoint: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;backreaction.blogspot.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;01&#x2F;electrons-dont-think.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;backreaction.blogspot.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;01&#x2F;electrons-dont-thi...</a>

I think there&#x27;s a lot of homo-exceptionalism in the challenges to this hypothesis.<p>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&#x27;s no reason that stones couldn&#x27;t also be. It&#x27;s a matter of degree, encoded in the complexity of that quasi-deterministic function mentioned above.<p>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 &#x27;I&#x27; 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.<p>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.

Here’s my problem with panpsychism: I don’t understand why it isn’t immediately self-refuting via Ockham’s razor.<p>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 ping-pong balls has more conscious experience than a human being. However this property agglutinates, it has to be something more than just “amount of matter”; it has to be some function of <i>which</i> matter and how it is arranged.<p>But that’s just the materialist position! “Matter can make conscious systems if and only if it’s arranged in a particular way (possibly, but not necessarily, meaning a way that involves simulating a Turing machine)” is materialism. At that point, the fundamental quanta of consciousness is an unnecessary addition to the theory that can be discarded with no difference.<p>I fully grant that I’m a programmer with very little philosophical background, but I just don’t get what the panpsychist hypothesis buys us that we didn’t already have.

I tend to think consciousness is universally fundamental and effectively intrinsic, since all we can know is our experience that requires it. That&#x27;s why we can never get behind consciousness, as noted by Max Plank in 1931. (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikiquote.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Max_Planck" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikiquote.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Max_Planck</a>)

Monadology (French: La Monadologie, 1714) which is one of Gottfried Leibniz&#x27;s best known works representing his later philosophy has pretty much the same arguments.<p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Monadology" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Monadology</a>

Even the theory&#x27;s advocate acknowledges in this interview that it&#x27;s untestable. There is no way to observe that the world would behave differently whether or not the theory is true. If that&#x27;s so, I can&#x27;t think what point there is discussing it, except as a mental exercise. If you can&#x27;t test a theory, that means it can&#x27;t affect anything. I.e. it has no practical use, except as a form of entertainment.<p>I would almost argue that it doesn&#x27;t make sense to talk about something being true or untrue if it cannot be tested nor used to make any predictions. The whole concept of truth, for me, reflects the extent to which reality conforms to belief. So if there isn&#x27;t and will never be a way to test a belief, then it&#x27;s neither true nor false.<p>IMO, this is the type of thinking that gives philosophers a bad rap.

This hits at a long standing question ive had about how consciousness arises. Its clear that it results mechanistically (obeying physics) from complex systems of simple components. The big question in my mind is whether it arises with a sudden jump (like a phase transition) or if its truly a continuum. I think mathematics may prove much more useful at disentangling this than the article implies.<p>&quot;Erdős and Rényi (1960) showed that for many monotone-increasing properties of random graphs, graphs of a size slightly less than a certain threshold are very unlikely to have the property, whereas graphs with a few more graph edges are almost certain to have it. This is known as a phase transition (Janson et al. 2000, p. 103).&quot;

&gt; There is a profound difficulty at the heart of the science of consciousness: consciousness is unobservable. You can’t look inside an electron to see whether or not it is conscious. But nor can you look inside someone’s head and see their feelings and experiences. We know that consciousness exists not from observation and experiment but by being conscious.<p>But can&#x27;t we measure brain waves with CAT scans? Isn&#x27;t there research going on now into observing brain patterns and actually figuring out what the subject is thinking about in real time?<p>Perhaps this lines up another distinction between the thinking mind and actual consciousness.....but I&#x27;m not really convinced by the argument that consciousness is an unobservable black box.

&gt; Panpsychism gives us a way of resolving the mystery of consciousness, a way that avoids the deep difficulties that plague more conventional options.<p>Eh, not really. With panpsychism you end up with, e.g. human, consciousness often becoming an emergent property of complex-enough systems. But in reality, you might have systems that are quite complicated (say, more complicated than a brain even) that <i>aren&#x27;t</i> conscious. I do think that consciousness is most likely a &quot;foundational&quot; property of our universe, but the argument that &quot;everything is conscious&quot; (even to a tiny degree) doesn&#x27;t seem very useful.

Oh, it&#x27;s cool the universe (both laws and initial energy&#x2F;mass distribution) provides a mechanism to blow things apart and squish them together on so many time scales and in so many ways. The universe is so dead and cold overall, but extraordinarily verdant in places like Earth, a tiny place in a sliver of time.<p>I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s consciousness (or some form of entelechy) built into space-time. It&#x27;s more like a kind of complexity-seeking at the several interlocking scales in a gravity well that happens to sit in some ambient heat.

I am more interested in the nature of consciousness than its location . . . not sure where this idea could lead.

My only concern with the consciousness debate is purely from a self-preservation PoV. Here is a scenario to elaborate: 1) In fifty years compute horsepower is enough to be able to fully simulate a brain. 2) population of earth is 10B and climate change is really making the planet unlivable. 3) we believe that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon 4) we decide we&#x27;ll invest in computronium and just continue our (&amp; other species) lives in cyberspace 5) civilization opts-in to shed the mortal coil and jump to cyberspace.<p>now at this point some super advanced quantum computer realizes that wait a minute, we made some subtle mistake and there does seems to be something else (perhaps quantum) aspect to consciousness that we missed. so now essentially we have committed genocide on ourselves. I just want to be really really really sure that there is nothing else to consciousness before I give in to the &#x27;emergent consciousness thesis&#x27;.<p>Personally, I like Roger penrose&#x27;s &#x27;Orchestrated objective reduction&#x27; theory of consciousness where he posits that proto-consciousness is an innate property of universe due to quantum wavefunction collapse. so essentially everytime there is a wf collapse its like the system had a conscious moment. human brain is just an instrument complex enough to &#x27;catch&#x27; phenomena and turn it into a conscious experience. The &#x27;how&#x27; part is where it gets murky, there have been some attempts to link it to microtubules in brain cells but nothing concrete yet. IMO its worth a serious look from biochemistry point of view.

It always amazes me how much people refuse the reality of consciousness. Just goes to show you the mental gymnastics people will use to contort themselves in order to maintain some semblance of coherency in their world view.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=lfAhup-fDYs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=lfAhup-fDYs</a><p>Same guy was on Sean Carroll&#x27;s podcast. His arguments didn&#x27;t resonate with me very well.

What if our ideas about consciousness were an artifact of our language?<p>Just like our ideas about morality? Where a lot of the time if you are explicit all the “mystery” goes away?<p>So when you say an ought statement “A should do B”, what you really mean is “A should do B if A wants C to happen” which expands to “If A does B and C doesn’t happen, then any D can’t blame A if D wants to be rational”. It’s a bit self referential like that.<p>Ok so now everything suddenly becomes clear and you find you can’t formulate a single basic question about morality in English that doesn’t have an obvious answer. “You should do your homework! Unless you don’t care about your grades.” or “You should be consistent! Unless you don’t care about being viewed as a hypocrite.”<p>What if things simply were, and scrupulously including unspoken clauses made all basic questions about consciousness have obvious answers?<p>“What is it like to be a bat” is not a well formulated question.<p>However, try including the subject and object of the sentence all the time.<p>The bat saw the phenomenon<p>The bat’s body experienced a feeling<p>And so on.<p>Then the question comes down to two things:<p>1) Identity. That is a mental construct that organisms develop. It can have a lot of layers, such as how you see yourself, how you choose to express yourself, etc. But the biggest one is how you identify with the person you were a few years ago and with who you will be in the future. If you were gonna go on a vacation for 2 weeks but later not remember anything about it, does it matter where you go? Do you do things just to make your 80 year old self proud to remember them? And so on.<p>2) Existence. Yes actually the word existence has no well-defined meaning without resorting to conscious observers. Consider the question of whether the Harry Potter World exists or not. How is it different than not existing or a made-up work like blabladeblaa? The sentence “the Harry Potter World Really Exists” has almost no meaning without resorting to consciousness, we are just used to saying that word. Be thorough and you’ll always invoke yourself and your conscious awareness.<p>Now what if life never arose in the universe? In what sense would the universe exist any more than a Harry Potter world?<p>So in a way, the concepts of existence of consciousness are duals of each other!<p>People often think that the concept of existence is something fundamental. But it is really a dual of the concept of consciousness.

Give me a precise definition and I&#x27;ll give you a precise answer. Can you write that question in mathematical notation? If not then don&#x27;t expect a precise answer

Panpsychism is also supported by Integrated Information Theory. So far it is probably the most fruitful attempt to mathematically describe consciousness.

Why does &quot;panPshychism&quot; sound like the idea of &quot;Brahman&quot; from Veda? Is it same as Brahman? If not, what is the difference?

Mildly relevant: Peter Watts&#x27; novel Blindsight

And to think that I used to have great respect for Scientific American magazine. This article is the worst sort of pseudo-intellectual tripe. It uses fancy-schmancy academic language to dress up silly ideas and wordplay. Masking itself in the facade of reasonableness to make hand-wavy conjecture and baseless assertions. Moreover, many of the supporting points made by Goff are simply wrong, betraying his ignorance of our current understanding of nature. I&#x27;m saddened that SA has published this.

Isn&#x27;t this the idea behind Philip Pullman&#x27;s <i>His Dark Materials</i>?

I believe time is intrinsically linked with our experience of consciousness, maybe consciousness in general.<p>Sorry for the armchair philosophy, this is a topic I like to think about.<p>We know that time is the 4th dimension, all things exist in 4-dimensions and we just experience one &#x27;slice&#x27; of this dimension at a time. The concept of something having &#x27;not happened yet&#x27; really means &#x27;we haven&#x27;t experienced it yet&#x27; - it&#x27;d be like saying that the house 5 blocks away isn&#x27;t on fire &#x27;yet&#x27;, simply because we haven&#x27;t walked 5 blocks over and seen it yet. If we were able to move through time as freely as we move through other dimensions, then a house that catches on fire &#x27;tomorrow&#x27; is really on fire &#x27;now&#x27;(&#x27;now&#x27; really isn&#x27;t the right word here, but I don&#x27;t think a better one exists) - we just have to walk down the street into tomorrow and see it.<p>In this way, we also exist as infants and as old men and women at the same time. We experience on infinitesimally small slice of ourselves at a time, each slice being a moment in time. Why don&#x27;t we experience this all at once? Our body IS existing in the past and the future and the now, we are all tasting our 60th birthday cake right now, but we don&#x27;t experience it yet.<p>There are two possibilities: Consciousness is the one thing that exists outside of time, such that instead of existing throughout our whole lifespan consistently and experiencing our whole life at once and constantly, we move through time experiencing one moment at a time, and maybe move into and out of time via birth&#x2F;death. If you start thinking about memory this gets very interesting(as does the other possibility) in so far as memory is represented by the physical state of your brain and memory stores &#x27;past&#x27; events. Basically implying that for some reason the 4D shape of your brain is such that on the &#x27;future&#x27; side of your brain there are neurons arranged in such a way to describe what the state of your brain is on the &#x27;past&#x27; side.<p>OR, consciousness does exist within 4 dimensions as our bodies do, and we ARE experiencing our entire lives at once. I don&#x27;t know about you, but for me it FEELS like I&#x27;m only experiencing this single moment right now. But that doesn&#x27;t mean I&#x27;m not also experiencing every other moment right now. At this moment in time, my brain is in a certain state(in terms of neurons and neurochemicals), that state encodes my memories and feelings that I have at this moment, personally I think that state encodes all the qualities of my consciousness, but I know this could be argued. So if I were experiencing all moments at once, then this moment would feel exactly like it would feel if this were the only moment I was experiencing. I would also be experiencing moments in the future, and in those moments this moment would be just a memory. So how do I know whether I&#x27;m experiencing those other moments as well right now, this current moment clearly feels unique to me and it seems like the only moment I&#x27;m experiencing, but maybe that&#x27;s how all moments feel. Maybe there is a different &#x27;me&#x27; experiencing every other moment right now, and I happen to be in this moment typing this message BECAUSE this moment IS the one where I happen to be sitting here typing this message. The me that&#x27;s eating my 60th birthday cake is also doing that right now, and not thinking about the nature of consciousness, but maybe has a vague memory of this moment because the physical structure of my brain encodes &#x27;previous&#x27; brain states as memories in &#x27;future&#x27; brain states for whatever reason.

This is textbook God of the Gaps<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;God_of_the_gaps" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;God_of_the_gaps</a><p>It adds nothing to our understanding of the universe, but it gives some people a warm and fuzzy feeling.

Do you remember when this philosophy was called animism?

Broadening the definition of consciousness to the literal limits seems pointless, it dilutes the already difficult to manifest definition of consciousness to complete uselessness.

This is the exact wrong direction we should take if we want to have any hope of understanding consciousness. Rather than pass a bong around and declare the whole universe is conscious, we should question the consciousness even of entities whose consciousness we currently take for granted. We should ask: is it really true that all humans are conscious[1], or is there something specific that triggers consciousness? For example, maybe consciousness is caused by a certain benevolent bacteria living in our guts, and anyone without that bacteria isn&#x27;t conscious. If we refuse to even question these things, then of course we&#x27;ll never come up with any answer.<p>[1] Of course, it goes without saying that for ethical purposes we should act under the assumption that all humans are conscious.

is it just me or is there something on this website that makes scrolling the page unusable?

I recently finished watching Prof. Patrick Grim&#x27;s excellent Mind-Body Philosophy[0] course, which helped me clarify my own position. I thought that it fit reasonably well under the term &quot;panpsychism&quot;, but this article is making me think it may be something slightly different. Under the expectation that it has already been studied, I&#x27;m now curious what it is named.<p>In short, I am a computationalist[1]: consciousness is a pattern that may appear in physical processes. I expect it can be translated into different physical processes. I think the definitional boundary separating conscious processes from other processes is subjective, even if there are common landmarks we generally agree are on one side or the other.<p>That seems all well and good. However I am not a hard materialist[2]: I do not believe that physicalism addresses the hard problem of consciousness[3]. I like to note this by the absence of timelessness in my experience: the present moment seems to be distinguished from the perceived past and future only because I am experiencing it. Contrast this to a physical description or model of myself and my surroundings that seems sound without reference to a specific &quot;present&quot; moment. To see that such a model does not contain a &quot;now&quot;, think about simulating it: you would need to choose a moment on the timeline to start, to insert a &quot;now&quot;. Physical models don&#x27;t seem to capture the notion of &quot;present moment&quot;. Attempts to shoe-horn it in (with e.g. consciousness particles or what have you) seem simultaneously untestable and offensive to Occam&#x27;s razor.<p>Subjective experience then seems to be unaccounted for. I am content saying it is not found in any model of physical processes, only in the physical processes themselves. Notice I am no longer talking about consciousness: the computation and brain state is still susceptible to description. Only the subjective experience, whose toe we can catch with the present moment, escapes.<p>Odd as it might sound, I find it tempting to say that the subjective experience is not personal. It seems incommunicable, but what I mean is that there is no aspect of myself in it: that&#x27;s all over in the computation (incidentally I am reminded of one of the objections to &quot;Cogito, ergo sum&quot;[4].)<p>At this point, the idea of &quot;Atman&quot;[5] is starting to look pretty good (thank you those who found the Adviata link, I would not have.) However, besides Prof. Grim&#x27;s touch on the topic I know nothing about it (haw). My impression of Atman is that it is ineffable, primitive and pervasive. It does not have a location because it is not a thing: it is an aspect of reality.<p>And now we arrive at panpsychism, or at least what I thought panpsychism is. Subjective experience, but not the computational content that gives rise to the more visible parts of consciousness, is a fundamental aspect of reality. Rocks have subjective experience. Rocks are not conscious, unless they include physical processes we choose to recognize as consciousness. A rock&#x27;s subjective experience is a lot like your subjective experience of the IR spectrum, assuming that you are like me and have no qualia affected by it.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thegreatcourses.com&#x2F;courses&#x2F;mind-body-philosophy.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thegreatcourses.com&#x2F;courses&#x2F;mind-body-philosophy...</a> [1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Computational_theory_of_mind" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Computational_theory_of_mind</a> [2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Materialism" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Materialism</a> [3]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hard_problem_of_consciousness" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hard_problem_of_consciousness</a> [4]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cogito,_ergo_sum#Use_of_%22I%22" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cogito,_ergo_sum#Use_of_%22I%2...</a> [5]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Advaita_Vedanta" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Advaita_Vedanta</a>

no-one knows...

Pure nonsense theory

This is bad philosophy masked in scientific jargon.

&gt; That’s what panpsychists believe.<p>Why is it we can&#x27;t discuss ideas without labeling someone as a -ist of some kind?

Panpsychism is incredibly silly. It&#x27;s just obfuscated dualism. It literally doesn&#x27;t explain <i>anything</i>, and it&#x27;s obviously wrong for the simple reason that it gives no way to explain why humans <i>act on</i> their conscious experience and have it modelled internally <i>as</i> a conscious experience.<p>The brain&#x27;s use of electrical pulses or DNA doesn&#x27;t result in an innate internal model of electricity or DNA. Similarly, if a proton has ‘experience’, then clearly ‘experience’ is a property <i>completely outside</i> of the computation the mind performs, and so we should not have introspective awareness of it. (Or rather, if we were to, the question of why would be no easier than the original Hard Problem.)

Information is dark matter. Absence of information is dark energy. A shower thought of mine...

&gt; Does Consciousness Pervade the Universe?<p>NO!<p>&gt; Where does consciousness come from?<p>Emergent properties of a functional brain.

No, consciousness can only appear in self-replicating systems, unless it is artificially supported (as in AI). Without self-replication there is no genetic evolution, and without evolution there can be no consciousness.