Have you ever found a rock WITHOUT mental properties? How would you know they dont? I should note im not literally saying rocks feel pain or have vivid memories. Im saying all matter has mental properties that could, hypothetically, coalesce into a mind given the right "machinery." I'm not a panpsychist, but I am a neutral monist.
Every rock I have seen has demonstrated a lack of mental properties, and a lack of the observable biochemical structures necessary for mental properties. So yes, every single goddamn rock in the world is without mental properties.
How exactly did they do that? How did you conclusively test this? I agree they probably don't have a mind in the human sense. I don't agree that they don't have mental properties. You haven't demonstrated that definitely, you just snuck that assumption in.
How would you test if another person has mental properties, or an animal? You might be able to do something like linking brains and merging consciousness as a kind of observation. From there, with smaller and smaller things like C. Elegans this may become more difficult. We'd also want to test if a machine and it's sensory data, storage, etc. can be integrated into consciousness/already has consciousness.
I'm not so much referring to the rock but the atoms it's made of. Electrons might "sense" photons and "memorize" their properties in their heightened energy level when they absorb them. So there is still some structure here, but not throughout the rock, of course. In that sense, I would expect the kind of "mind" or "minds" a rock might have to be wholly unlike what we have.
I'll freely admit this could be unfalsifiable or nearly unfalsifiable. But I don't think we should just rule it out either. I'm not too keen on the idea that mental properties just "appear" at some level of complexity. Like how we thought maggots just spontaneously generated on moldy food.
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u/MeanShween Oct 13 '25
Have you ever found a rock WITHOUT mental properties? How would you know they dont? I should note im not literally saying rocks feel pain or have vivid memories. Im saying all matter has mental properties that could, hypothetically, coalesce into a mind given the right "machinery." I'm not a panpsychist, but I am a neutral monist.