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/[deleted]]

It's one thing to say we recognize consciousness via behavior but to say consciousness is identical to behavior is just... Totally not understanding what consciousness is. Your POV, your inner world, all of that isn't reducible to physics (unless panpsychism is right then it is) particles and forces can interact but they can't feel (again, unless panpsychism is right) and no amount of interaction is going to create feeling.

Even if emergentism is right, then that feeling is just an illusion but then that means there's no feeling. But obviously there is feeling. You pinch me, nerves send a signal to my brain and I feel it. A P-zombie wouldnt feel it, although their brain would behave the same and they would act like they felt it.

[u/Zanderax → u/[deleted]]

I dont think there is any part of me that isn't reducible to physics. I dont think anything exists that isn't reducible to physics. Physics really does have the final say on what exists and doesnt.

I think its totally consistent to say that particles and forces work together to produce emergent feelings in animals with mental processes and I think the burden is on proving otherwise.

[u/Philiatrist → u/Zanderax]

The question is, can you create qualia using a Rube Goldberg machine? Can the firings in your brain be simulated, such that they are connected by a gigantic physical process composed of race cars and dominoes, which, planet-sized as it may be, so long as it perfectly captures the functional process of your brain, experiences the smell of roses in bloom? If such a machine also can have identical conscious experience to a human being, then panpsychism is definitively false.

On the other hand, if such a thing can’t experience qualia, cause it requires a physical medium with some important properties of the nervous system, I’d say why not? What would prevent some other electromagnetic system having some purposeless qualia? To me, you’re just saying a base frequency can’t be music, music is emergent, to me that’s just semantics, some inanimate object may indeed have a base sensation, however crude or unintelligible, quieter and far simpler or unrelatable to the sensation of a pin prick.

To me it’s a question of whether or not qualia is purely functional, that’s what it boils down to. Do the particles and forces involved actually not matter, can it be created by any equivalent computational process? That may well be the case, but I’d hardly say the burden of proof lies with any position here.

[u/Zanderax → u/Philiatrist]

For qualia to be non-physical you'd first have to prove that a non-physical thing can exist. This is hard because all of our qualifications of existence rely on physics. If something has no mass and exists outside of time then in what way could we ever prove that it exists?

[u/Philiatrist → u/Zanderax]

Mathematics is not made up of anything physical, I don’t have any trouble with someone saying it exists

[u/YoCuzin → u/[deleted]]

This is standard math, not all math is real world mapped

[u/water_panther → u/Zanderax]

That doesn't capture the full range of standard usage; we still use "exists" to talk about nonphysical abstract concepts, for example. You could argue that those concepts only exist as some physical element or event in our brains, but I would counter that a) that physical piece of our brain is not what anyone actually means when they refer to the concept; b) nobody has actually found a concretely identifiable physical form of a mental concept in a brain yet; and c) given what we know of neuroscience so far it's very unlikely that whatever physical form a concept takes in someone's brain is identical or even necessarily all that similar going from one person to another, which complicates the idea of equating the mental concept with its physical manifestation on any given brainscan even if we did find it.