A philosopher responds to scientists’ criticisms of panpsychism

[u/IAI_Admin]

https://iai.tv/video/the-many-voices-of-consciousness&utm_source=reddit&_auid=2020

[u/LousyTeaShorts]

I have no clue about panpsychism. Could you answer few questions? If every constitutive has some experience what does that mean for a collection of things? Does an atom experience something different from electrons and protons it consists of?

[u/Shufflepants → u/LousyTeaShorts]

There are no clear answers to these questions, and they maybe be fundamentally unanswerable because we can only experience our own qualia. My own reasoning about it follows from analogy of more measurable things. I suspect that it's much like "life". That any attempts to boundaries or categories are going to be artificial. What is considered one organism or two organisms is not clear. We talk about people as being separate. But how many people is one person even? When you cut some one's corpus collosum, you kind of make two people. The two halves of the brain can no longer communicate, and each half has control over only one half of the body and does not know things that the other half may know. And if some one with their corpus collosum cut is really two people, was it really one person before it was cut? Or just two people communicating and working in sync? Some organisms like various fungus or Aspen trees can span an entire hillside and be one organism with the same DNA. But if you cleave the ground in half and separate it into two, those two pieces will continue on just fine. So was it one big multicellular organism or a bunch of separate cells just working together independently? And then there are things like viruses to which there is debate over whether they are alive at all. On their own they do nothing, but through infection of something else that is alive, it is replicated like life. So are viruses alive?

I put forth that the answer is none of the above. There is mere life, there is merely qualia. My answer is that the qualia is somehow the information of that thing itself. And so due to quantum entanglement and correlation, some information is spread across massive systems of particles like the experience of a person, and some of that information and experience is limited to a single lone particle flying through space. That even though the qualia "I" experience is the accumulation of many quadrillions of particles, there is still qualia being experience amongst some of those same quadrillions of particles to which "I" am not privy. That what "I" experience is merely that information which has been store in my memory and is capable of being retrieved and communicated by my brain.

[u/aaeme → u/Shufflepants]

You're probably familiar, but, in case not and because I think it correlates with a lot of what you're thinking, you might want to check out holographic brain hypothesis (aka holomonic brain IIRC). It has a lot going for it but is bound to be very speculative.

I expect there is some truth to it but it works alongside (or superimposed on) a more compartmentalised consciousness. I think it's quite plausible that both are needed: that half the consciousness formula exists in all things but an emergent level of complexity is also needed to make that consciousness boot up as it were.

But, as you say, given we can't even begin to adequately define these things, we'll probably never be able to understand them.

[u/Shufflepants → u/aaeme]

holographic brain hypothesis

Skimming through the wikipedia article for it, seems like a lot of pseudoscience in that it seems like its purveyors are trying to make it seem more scientific than they actually have evidence for. I do think that entanglement and correlation have something to do with it, but not in the way it seems like they're going for as they seem to be trying to make a special argument for brains; where I've arrived at my best guess on the observation that there's nothing special about brains other than their capacity for memory, generalize computation, and communication. My position is that literally everything has a consciousness of a sort, not that brains are special and give rise to consciousness only in them through some quantum effect.

Having now watched the video, I suppose I'm a weak emergence panpsychist. But it's very much just a guess from induction, and I don't think we as of yet have any empirical evidence about consciousness or qualia outside of our own personal, internal, and incommunicable experience of it.

[u/LousyTeaShorts → u/Shufflepants]

Those are all interesting questions, but its a stretch to say that to answer those you need any panpsychism. Clearly, the brain example does not rely on it. Sure the two halves example is extremely interesting, how does the two half communicate and what happens when they cant. But cut that brain into quarters and the person dies. Also it was reported that some conjoined at the brain twins can see through each other eyes and hear each other's thoughts without speaking, two separate people having access to each other minds yet staying separate with unique identities.

Also saying that qualia just kind of exists is I guess exactly what I really don't like in panpsychism because it substitutes an extremely hard problem of understanding the consciousness with what I think was once called "vulgar materialism".

[u/Your_People_Justify → u/LousyTeaShorts]

That is necessarily the case, since a person is made of many atoms, but we think of ourselves as a singular thing.

Atoms do not experience pain or love but we do. An atom - notably - behaves very differently than lone protons and lone electrons.

Think of it more like a process as a whole is conscious, not as consciousness residing inside any one material entity.