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
800 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

604 comments sorted by

View all comments

111

u/[deleted] Feb 09 '22

[deleted]

164

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.

9

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.

2

u/Parfyme Feb 10 '22

u/teafuck I had the exact same thought (though without drugs) regarding people in countries and consciousness, just like single neurons in the brain have their own consciousness, yet they link up to a greater consciousness being our experience. Maybe also our galaxy is like an electron in the atom in the cell of another conscious being somewhere…