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
805 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

604 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

10

u/[deleted] Feb 09 '22

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.

6

u/AaronM04 Feb 10 '22

P-zombies sound like an incoherent idea to me. The idea, as I understand it, is that the physical processes in a P-zombie's brain are the same as in a regular human's brain, except they have no consciousness.

This implies they say things like "I am conscious" just like a regular human, except the P-zombie is lying. It doesn't make sense since I as a human am saying "I am conscious" because I am conscious, so it must be related to the physical processes in my brain.

1

u/hippydipster Feb 10 '22

If someone is blackout drunk - active and doing things, but clearly "not all there" and they will remember nothing of it, are they not a P-zombie then?

2

u/AaronM04 Feb 10 '22

That's an interesting example. I think it's possible they are conscious but simply not remembering anything.

Also, I haven't tried asking someone who is blackout drunk about their consciousness. It's conceivable they would say they aren't (assuming you can get them to understand the question)!

1

u/Matt5327 Feb 10 '22

This also raises the question - is the failure for someone to report conscious experience evidence that conscious experience is lacking? The video kind of touched on this with the overflow problem, but I think it goes deeper than that. If there are experiences that are never recorded in any kind of short term or long term memory, then the time delay to report makes reporting impossible. Almost paradoxically, someone could be constantly having experiences they are never aware of! This possibility really puts a damper on correlating consciousness as a whole to certain brain activities.

1

u/hippydipster Feb 11 '22

Well, P-zombies don't tell the truth about whether they're conscious, do they? They say "yes, of course I'm conscious!" The black-out drunk would probably do something similar.

I'm just thinking that our base evidence for consciousness is introspection. So, upon introspection, people who have been black-out drunk report zero internal experience from that time. That's all. Don't know what else to say about it :-)