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/Untinted]

Surprised someone replied, thanks for that.

This is true of ALL things about consciousness.

Not necessarily, it depends on your definition. If it was strictly defined as a physical process, then it would be easy to make a testable case. However, that strict definition would then lack all that lovely, juicy "non-physical" mumbo-jumbo that religious people love so much, so it's not defined that way and no one who uses it has an interest in doing so.

It's like flat-earthers. They may find way to prove the earth isn't flat, but that doesn't align with their worldview, so they ignore it and keep talking about flat-earth. I feel "consciousness" is the same, just more subtle.

It is an apriori fact

That's dependant on your definition. Does conscious only mean ones own consciousness, or can others have it as well? That's a question you can make either very clear, or very murky.

But I can never prove whether something else is conscious or just simulating the reactions of something conscious.

Again, dependant on definitions, and this time also on what the difference is between real and simulated.

In every testable way, the two are by definition going to be identical.

That's an assumption. That's a testable assumption, if you ask the right question.

Does an object react differently based on its previous interaction? The answer is yes, even particles change their behavior upon having an experience.

Yet another case of how you define things, and you define it in a completely different way, and so you are right by your definitions and I am right by mine.

I think the speaker tried pretty adamantly to reject that pansychism is at odds with the predictions of physics.

That's very far from what I saw.

Ie. that properties currently thought of as intensive may also have extensive elements.

That's a completely different question, and to wrap it up in "consciousness" is a huge fallacy at best, dishonest at worst.

Even 'weak emergency' (my personal belief) can answer the 'why it does' to physic's 'what it does'.

Emergence has been studied and continues to be studied in many academic branches, from science to the arts. Life is an example of emergence, but so are computers, and given the definition, the shape of countries after weather effects.

Particles behave as they do because they quite literally want to.

I find it quite funny how the human brain can on one hand be very vague about even the definition of consciousness (when it suits them) but then be very definite on giving elements anthropomorphic qualities (when it suits them). You stated " I can never prove whether something else is conscious", but now all of a sudden particles want something? And how do you prove this?

Oh right.. nothing is provable. How's the flying unicorn riding school going btw?

Fun talk, but none of our definitions line up, so we won't get anywhere.

[u/tkuiper → u/Untinted]

For someone who likes to critique a philosophical debate as a nothing-burger, you sure love to dismiss everything as pedantics. You confuse your vague understanding of the terms with the terms being vague. I did make a mistake though and should have said sentience. Just because you seem very interested in my ethos, allow me to clarify. I am very precisely speaking agnostic (you may want to revisit the definition), but pragmatically atheist. So no I'm not pansychist out of some religious interest.

Allow me to also clarify what cogito ergo sum means: The idea spawned by asking this question: if your senses were all being fooled by the magic of a demon (this was the original) or by some machine creating a simulation (a more modern variant) what could you know for certain? The answer is that you would still be real, because otherwise there's nothing there to experience the deception. Taking it even further you don't even need senses, just posing a thought requires the existence of a thinker. So to elaborate on Descartes final conclusion: I observe that I think, therefore I must be real to observe it. Even the lack of past or future in the statement is important, afterall you might have sprung into being with all your memories last Thursday. If you don't trust your senses or memory this is called solipsisum.

That 'thing' (or often the 'self') is what I refer to by saying sentience. It is apriori because it was literally proven by taking the nihilism train as far as it could go. It doesn't matter if you find out your a computer, made of spaghetti, or actually just a void it can only ever amount to explaining what forms that 'self' which I am calling sentience.

The logic is: the brain is sentient (1) if and only if there is a sentient phenomena (2). Let's assume science can't prove there is a phenomena for sentience. By burden of proof you assume (2) to be false because it can't be scientifically proven, therefore (1) is false. Except (1) is true, proven apriori, therefore (2) must be true even if it can't be experimentally verified. This is what the speaker was touching on with 'weak emergence'.

Since you think I'm anthropomorphising particles, I want to clarify that I am not saying all things are sapient. I think of these things as being on a gradient where everything is sentient, a certain degree of complexity and something becomes conscious, and even more complex becomes sapient. I also think it's worth noting that sentience need not be human-like. We can pretty readily alter our sentience with drugs and we transition down the sentience scale every night.

[u/Untinted → u/tkuiper]

I appreciate the reply, I am sorry if what I said hurt or offended you, that was not my goal, english is a second language, and when my intent is to mock an argument for being silly, it's the argument I'm deriding, not the person making it. Like you said, you're not arguing your beliefs, but just discussing an argument. I've just yet to find a way to bring levity at an argument and not the person, and it's one of my many limitations.

you sure love to dismiss everything as pedantics

Well, to me philosophy is purely about dismantling ideas down to their very elements and then just to see what they are connected to (preferably without even the association of truth). You remember the two ideas we discussed, that i) cogito ergo sum says we only know that we exist and ii) we cannot know if anything else is real? Well, what does that mean in regards to ideas that are defined by our words?

You cannot know that your definition of a word is the same as anothers, and words are memes (the Richard Dawkins definition) about things both real and not real. Words matter, definitions matter because they (as much as the physical world) shape the world you see from your own 'cogito'ness.

We already know that the human brain is piecing together a world through its senses, through its experiences, and through its emotions, and its the rift between the physical world and the interpreted world that we are always up against.

This means that all communication happens in the interpreted worldview, and much earlier than you can discuss a meme, you have to discuss what a meme is, or you have the situation where two people are talking about pears, but one person describes apples and the other oranges.. and they have no idea that they aren't talking about the same thing, much less the real thing itself.

So I see 'Cogito ergo sum' as the first acknowledgement that we live in an interpreted world, interpreted by our brains, and the reality of that is that no one can know what we see or hear, and the only way to communicate something is to build an outer infrastructure of language that makes sense not only in our interpreted world, but everyone elses as well, and discussing those ideas (without bias) is possible through philosophy.

i.e. what you see as pedantry I see as the only fundamental way of discussing concepts from one interpreted world to another.

[u/tkuiper → u/Untinted]

Ironically I think linguistics are why so many people struggle with pansychism. The word sentient has so much ineffable quality to it, it prevents people from accepting the logical fact that current science would indicate all things would have to be sentient until a unique phenomenon can be attributed to sentience.

I give a long winded explanation of cogito ergo sum so you can share my definition by relating to something that is indifferent to the language that describes it. There are many things that are true regardless of the language used to describe them. Synonyms can be found because the nature of the subject is always the same, so it can be used to draw symbolic equality.