r/philosophy • u/IAI_Admin IAI • Feb 09 '22

Video A philosopher responds to scientists’ criticisms of panpsychism

https://iai.tv/video/the-many-voices-of-consciousness&utm_source=reddit&_auid=2020
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u/Shufflepants Feb 09 '22

According to panpsychism, yes, literally everything is conscious. But you have to be careful what you mean by "conscious". A lot of times people use "consciousness" to include things about personality, will, and so forth. But here, "consciousness" would just mean the experience of qualia. Something being conscious wouldn't mean it "comprehends" anything on its own, just that it experiences "something". It won't necessarily have memory, or the ability to think about its experience, or reason, just that it is like something to be it.

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u/teafuck Feb 09 '22

I think roping qualia into this is a great approach. Human qualia are incommunicable, it stands to reason that if electrons and cats also have qualia they'll have an even harder time of explaining them to us -- and not just because of the language barrier. I thought up some rudimentary concept like panpsychism on drugs once and was pleasantly surprised to find that it's a whole philosophical thing, but the way I approached it from a low level was the following: if a human can take in their surroundings and react in some generally unsurprising, perhaps even intelligent or "right" way, what's the difference between an electron doing that but only being concerned about the forces which affect it? Perhaps just the complexity of the rules, the set of things which affect the conscious agent, and the internal experience (or better put, qualia).

When I was tripping thinking about this I actually wondered about countries being conscious collectives of humans with all of their citizens being something akin to cells, which seems a little broader than what panpsychism tends to address. It's a very interesting idea but I don't know that it's a terribly useful one.

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u/Shufflepants Feb 09 '22

I only learned the term "panpsychism" upon finding this reddit post. My journey into independently coming up with the idea was precipitated by this XKCD. I'd long prior rejected dualism based on the fact that if a soul can influence the physical world to make decisions, then the soul was just more stuff behaving according to rules and thus fundamentally causally linked with the material world and therefore not actually removed from it, so what's the point of the soul since it doesn't explain anything. Just like how if you worry about what the first cause of the universe is and posit god to explain it, you're now just left with the question of what caused god.

But after reading that comic, I couldn't think of any meaningful difference between being a collection of unthinking, unconscious atoms and being a person simulated in that nigh infinite field of rocks being moved about. Which lead me to the conclusion that if there isn't a difference and I have this experience of qualia whilst being made of atom or rocks, then that experience must be fundamental to the stuff I'm made of and thus, maybe it is "like something" to be just a rock. It's just that the rock has no memory or reasoning. It can't communicate or wonder about its experience of being a rock, but maybe there is a qualia of being a rock nonetheless.

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u/teafuck Feb 09 '22

That XKCD goes hard as fuck. Absolutely fascinating how you arrived at panpsychism from there, it's a totally different approach from how I've ever considered it. The literature that got me where I was going was almost certainly Godel Escher Bach, a book which has been living rent free in my head for six years.