What is your explanation for the unity of experience?Panpsychism cannot explain the unity of experience. — MoK
End of the day, all theories explain it with, "That's the way it is." Even beyond theories of consciousness. Why is there something instead of nothing?I think panpsychism fails to explain the unity of experience; therefore, it is not acceptable. — MoK
Right. Single molecules of water cannot be wet. Wetness is a property of groups of molecules, because of the way they bond under certain conditions. And the molecules bond the way they do under those conditions because of their properties.And we don't understand how, by combining them together water could arise, because each individual molecule shows no "wetness".
— Manuel
We understand how. The properties of water are functions of the properties of parts. We can also simulate water. — MoK
I can't imagine explaining it as intuition, either. Nothing about string theory can be intuition, even if they can make an internally consistent, mathematically perfect theory. And there isn't any evidence to support the theory either.It is just not easy to have an intuition for how the properties of a particle can be explained in terms of the vibration of the string. I am not a string theorist, so I cannot tell you how a certain vibration leads to a particular property, but I am sure string theorists have good intuition about this. — MoK
Because off this:I can't see why you keep insisting that a particle, or a crystal, is a subject of experience. — Wayfarer
But Nagel also sees this as an argument in support of panpsychism: If consciousness really arises from matter, then the mental must in some way be present in the basic constituents of matter. On this view, consciousness is not an inexplicable product of complex organization but a manifestation of properties already present in the fundamental building blocks of the world. — Wayfarer
Fair enough.Well it's fine if you think that, but you should equally hold it against non physicalism that there's no non physicalist guess as to how it might work. It's not like you're abandoning a non working idea for a working idea - you're abandoning a lack of an idea for another lack of an idea.
That doesn't mean non physicalism is false, but it certainly shouldn't leave anybody with extreme confidence that it's true. — flannel jesus
Since a tree is so very different from us, its subjective experience of itself is very different from our subjective experience of ourselves. Which is my position on consciousness - simply the subjective experience of the given subject.It is not possible to say how much consciousness a tree has. It experiences weather and may store some memory, such as rings but it is unlikely that it has consciousness as we know it. — Jack Cummins
Is there a reason that our technologies cannot detect the physical mechanism of consciousness? We know about all kinds of things going on the brain, after all. Neurotransmitters are a great example.I don't know if I'm understanding you. Are you thinking there is a physical mechanism for consciousness within us, and we would be able to see it if our physical senses pointed inward?
Not only that but all mental and physical phenomena. — NOS4A2
I am attempting to have conversations about it, in the hopes of gaining any degree of understanding.I'm not thinking about it at all, because there's no model to think about. It's a placeholder thought, not a rich thought. There's no attempt to understand how it works — flannel jesus
It is appealing because, despite being able to detect and measure unimaginably small and large physical phenomena, we cannot so much as detect consciousness with our physical senses or sciences, there is no apparent connection between consciousness and the physical properties of the universe, and there is no physicalist guess as to how it might work. That makes a non physicalist approach speaking.and that's exactly why it's so appealing, I think, as an explanation for consciousness. — flannel jesus
I don't know if I'm understanding you. Are you thinking there is a physical mechanism for consciousness within us, and we would be able to see it if our physical senses pointed inward?The illusory aspects of consciousness is the result of how little information it gives about ourselves, the body. For instance our senses largely point outwards, towards the world, so I am unable to see what is going on behind my eyes. The periphery is so limited that I am completely unaware of what is going on inside my body save for the few and feint feelings it sometimes offers.
If that conscious periphery gave us enough information about the body I’m sure consciousness wouldn’t be a such a mystery, and ideas like panpsychism wouldn’t even be entertained. — NOS4A2
No, I don't think we do. I've never heard of any self repairing, non-living system. Not sure what that would even look like.But we don't usually think of inanimate objects as possessing internally maintained structural integrity. — Janus
I think non physicalism is the explanation because physicalism is not. Consciousness is non physical. That's why, despite having learned some pretty impressive things about the physical, we're struggling so hard to understand consciousness. We can't begin to study it with our physical sciences, and can't see any connection between physical properties and subjective experience.I posit this: that the only reason you think non physicalism is the explanation is because we have no understanding of non physicalism... — flannel jesus
I'm not sure about that. How can you be aware without experiencing?↪Patterner Something like that strikes me as highly plausible. I think that's roughly the Chalmersian take too - but he calls awareness without experience consciousness too - I find that a hard sell, but all else about panpsychism attracts me so .. I could just be wrong LOL — AmadeusD
Nicely said. So it's functional structure that is emergent? Top-Down causation?It's all about molecules, atoms, proteins and electrons, but it's not just about those things. As proper parts of living organism, those constituents are caught up into functionally organized anatomic structures (such as cell membranes) and channeled through the finely tuned and regulated metabolic pathways that Brian Greene provides striking descriptions of. Those are indeed processes that arise in far from equilibrium thermodynamic conditions such that relatively low-entropy forms of energy (such as incident solar radiation or energy-dense molecules like glucose) get harnessed by the molecular machinery to produce work in such a way as to sustain and reproduce this machinery. What is being sustained and reproduced isn't the parts, but the form: that is, the specific functional structure of the organism. The parts, and the proximal interactions between them, don't explain why the organism is structured in the way it is, or why it behaves in the way it does. Rather, the high-level norms of functional organization of the organism, characterised in the higher-level terms of anatomy and physiology, explain why the individual atoms, electrons, protons, and organic molecules are being caught up and channeled in the specific way that they are to sustain processes that are geared towards maintaining the whole organism (at least for awhile) away from complete decay and thermodynamic equilibrium. — Pierre-Normand
Without having ever read anything on the topic, I was a physicalist up until several years ago. I had never heard of the terms physicalism or materialism, but that's what I was. Never occurred to me there was another option, so what was my default position. A guy on another site wanted to pull his hair out because of my stubbornness, but, eventually, turned me around. It wasn't intuitive. Everything is physical particles, and everything, even consciousness, reduces to particles, was intuitive.↪Patterner I think you're not taking the emergent possibility seriously enough personally. The possibility that consciousness really does emerge from certain large scale physical arrangements and interactions. I think the idea seems alien to you - which is fair, it's by no means easy to grasp - and so your reflex is to go for something that's at least apparently more intuitive. — flannel jesus
Bad wording on my part. I think consciousness is always the same, and can always be causal. But the conscious thing in question has to be up to the task.I don't know at what point of complexity I think an entity must attain before its subjectively experience can be casual
— Patterner
That's a pretty big problem. Everything else fundamental is also fundamentally causal. It's not fundamental now, causal later - it's causal at a fundamental level. If consciousness isn't causal at a fundamental level, but it is causal at a microscopic scale... I think the whole idea, in my opinion, crumbles — flannel jesus
Perhaps the subjective experience of information processing systems of sufficient number and/or complexity is awareness. And when sufficient feedback loops are also present, the experience is self-awareness.I think awareness and consciousness differ — AmadeusD
No, that's not it. I don't see consciousness as being processes of being alive, mental processes, or anything. I see it as nothing but subjective experience.I wonder if you are seeing consciousness as being about the processes of being alive, as in that respect it is the same. However, rocks and crystals are not alive in the way we understand it. — Jack Cummins
I do not see it this way. My thinking is that consciousness is always the same. It is subjective experience. Nothing has rudimentary consciousness. What really counts is the thing having the subjective experience. What is the subjective experience of crystals? How does the subjective experiences of a crystal, an archaea, a plant, a mouse, a chimpanzee, a human?Saying that, I am not a dualist but am aware of the difference of objects and human consciousness, even though some even see human consciousness itself as an illusion. But, it is to speculate on different degrees of consciousness, ranging from minerals, plants animals and humans (possibly AI as a further development). — Jack Cummins
Agreed.This really gets to the nub of the problem. What I'm saying is that the knowledge we have of our own consciousness is of a different order to the knowledge we have that others are conscious. To be conscious is to know of our own existence, in a direct and unmediated way. I know that I am in a different way to the indirect and mediated knowledge I have of other minds.
Chalmers’ “what-it-is-like”-ness is precisely about this direct, first-person givenness. That element — the qualitative feeling of being — is not captured by any third-person account, no matter how detailed. This is where the irreducibly subjective aspect of consciousness shows itself. — Wayfarer
I do not think it is a misstep.This is why I think the panpsychist move is ultimately a misstep. By trying to objectify consciousness — to treat it as a measurable attribute of matter — it attempts to assimilate consciousness into the obective mode, from which it is essentially different. The first-person reality of consciousness doesn’t appear as an object in the world; it manifests as the point of view from which the world is experienced. — Wayfarer
What guess about the nature of consciousness doesn't have to deal with the combination problem? Does it somehow make more sense that consciousness is nothing but the physical activity of the brain, and the activity of these neurons over here are all somehow combined into one subjective visual experience, the activity of those neurons over there all somehow combine into one subjective aural experience, and the activity of both groups of neurons, as well as that of still other groups of neurons, somehow combine into one subjective experience that is visual, aural, and whatever else?Panpsychism is also subject to the 'combination problem' - the question about how primitive, conscious units of matter are able to combine in such a way as to give rise to the unitary sense of self that characterises actual conscious experience. — Wayfarer
Not sure what you mean. What example of yours would I be countering? Just curious. I'm not looking to counter you. I'm just wondering how you would measure such a thing.I could not find any, so my assertion above stands. A counterexample is required. — noAxioms
I don't know about fundamental consciousness. I don't think we can be conscious of the things we are conscious of without some kind of fundamental consciousness. But I don't think the subjective experience of a particle is causing anything. I don't know at what point of complexity I think an entity must attain before its subjectively experience can be casual, any more than any physicalist can say at what point they think the physical complexity of the brain causes consciousness to emerge.Effects are measured in physical change. You measure a physical change, how do you determine that it was fundamental consciousness that caused that rather than something else? Some other physical cause? — flannel jesus
And I disagree. I'm willing to believe we are all conscious. Just because I can't know your instance of consciousness doesn't mean I won't accept that you are conscious. I do. I can't prove that any consciousness other than my own exists, but I don't care about proof in this instance. If I didn't accept your consciousness as fact, I wouldn't be participating in the conversation. So my starting point is that subjective experience is an objective fact. And the explanation is (maybe) that consciousness is a fundamental part of reality.You're looking at the question as if it is an objective matter - a question of 'what is really there'' and whether 'consciousness' is a constituent of the objective domain. But I'm saying that this is the wrong way to look at it. — Wayfarer
You interpret it that way. I interpret it that physical is not all there is to reality.That's what panpsychism does, though. Mass, charge and other physical properties are observable and measurable, whereas the idea that matter possesses properties of consciousness is purely conjectural. Again, it is an attempt to rescue the credibility of materialism by saying it must be a property in all matter - instead of questioning materialism itself. That is explicitly what Galen Strawson says about it, mine is not a straw man argument. — Wayfarer
Can you elaborate? How do you measure the effect consciousness has on everything else? What's the method, or procedure? Which sense, or what tool, is used?If consciousness is fundamental, then we can't measure it in the ways we measure everything else.
— Patterner
Sure you can. You can measure its effect on everything else. — noAxioms
Sorry. I didn't mean you. I meant people in general, as a result of "Galileo's Error".Careful with this 'we'. I've looked at philosophy of mind from many perspectives. — Wayfarer
I like the snippet. Wish his books didn't cost so much.For those actually interested the Causal issue here is a snippet from Davidson expressing something akin to what I am getting at: — I like sushi
Ain't it the truth. Materialism. Physicalism. Naturalism. Nagel even says 'I will use the terms “materialism” or “materialist naturalism” to refer to one side of this conflict...' I can't imagine there will ever be a consensus on the exact meaning of these words, and anything less than exact can only lead to discussions of definitions. Which takes away from the more important discussion. I think the best solution is probably to not use any of them, and just spell out what you mean every time.Property Dualism in a nutshell? It does get confusing when people use differing terms to describe the same idea.
Another example would be physicalism and materialism. People tend to use this as synonyms while others do not. What is important is to clarify your position and use of terminology. — I like sushi
It certainty is.This is the crux of the so-called "hard problem": how consciousness could possibly emerge from wholly non-conscious components. But note the implicit assumption — that a configuration of matter and forces gives rise to inner experience. What if this assumption is itself misguided? — Wayfarer
Another way of looking at it is that I don't think we have any justification for saying reality contains only the things we have discovered, or can discovered, with our senses and the devices we've built. Consciousness is proof of this, and there's no reason to rule out a building block, as it were, for the consciousness we're familiar with. Everything else we're familiar with is built up from some kind of building block, after all.In other words, instead of questioning the conceptual framework that makes consciousness seem alien to materialism, Strawson redefines matter to include it — which looks suspiciously like moving the goalposts. That's the sleight-of-hand that panpychism tries to get away with. — Wayfarer
How can it be that thinking consciousness is a fundamental property of reality is not challenging the presuppositions of naturalism?Hence the various contortions in contemporary philosophy of mind — from eliminativism and behaviourism to panpsychism — all share a desire to naturalise consciousness, but without challenging the presuppositions of naturalism itself. — Wayfarer
I don't see it as "grafted", "inserted", or "added on", any more than properties like mass or electric charge are. Everything is just a part of what is. As such, consciousness is not "puzzling." The problem is that we are so used to thinking of things in only one way that it's difficult to consider there might be other ways.rather than grafting mental properties onto matter
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Consciousness isn’t simply another puzzle to be inserted into a pre-existing picture of the world
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not of matter with consciousness as a puzzling add-on — Wayfarer
But what is the Hard Problem?Philosophim does not believe there is a Hard Problem.
— I like sushi
Incorrect. We cannot know what its like to have the subjective experience of another individual, and while this is the case, the hard problem will be unsolvable. — Philosophim
If consciousness is fundamental, then we can't measure it in the ways we measure everything else. It's not physical, and all of our methods of detecting and measuring are physical.I agree. But I don't think all properties are physical.
— Patterner
That's another tack, suggesting properties of trivial parts (atoms say) that have never been measured by anything studying atoms. — noAxioms
The HPoC is explaining why the altered brain states alter the person's subjective experience. Why do brain states have subjective experience at all? There is no physicalist theory, or even a guess. As Hoffman and Greene said about the physical properties off the universe:We can clearly see brain states influencing behaviors and responses from individuals that demonstrate altered brain states alter the person's subjective experience. — Philosophim
We can answer these questions. We can explain these things, at least in terms of properties of particles. Negatively charged electrons, electron shells, positively charged protons, etc. Because of all that, atoms are formed, molecules are formed, graphite is formed... We can't explain how/why electrons have negative charge, protons have positive charge, electron shells have the specific numbers of atoms they have... But we can explain down to that level.Why does hydrogen and two oxygen in combination at a certain temperature become a water? This question applies to the entirety of existence. Why is a rock hard? Why from carbon can we construct graphite and all living things? — Philosophim
We cannot account for every molecule of air in a room, but we do fine measuring things like temperature and air pressure. And the temperature and pressure are, and are specifically what they are, because of individual molecules.I view the objects and phenomena of pretty much all the special sciences (e.g. biology, ecology, psychology, economics, etc.) to be strongly emergent in relation with the the objects and phenomena of the material sciences such as physics or chemistry. Some, like our apokrisis argue (and I would agree) that even within physics, especially when the thermodynamics of non-equilibrium processes is involved, many phenomena are strongly emergent in the sense that they aren't intelligible merely in light of, or deducible from, the laws that govern their smaller components. — Pierre-Normand
It's all about the molecules, atoms, and proteins and electrons.Evidence for the unity of life grows even more convincing as we follow the subsequent journey of the energy released by electrons hopping from one redox reaction to another. That energy is used to charge up biological batteries that are built into each and every cell. In turn, the biological batteries power the synthesis of molecules particularly adept at transporting and delivering energy wherever and whenever it is needed throughout a cell. It is an elaborate process. But across life, it is the same process.
In broad outline here is how it goes. As an electron jumps into the outstretched molecular arms of a given redox receptor, the receiving molecule twitches, causing it to shift its orientation relative to other molecules closely packed around it, much like a gear ratcheting one step forward. When the fickle electron subsequently jumps to the next redox receptor, the first molecule clicks back to its original orientation, while the new molecular recipient experiences the twitch. As the electron executes further jumps, the pattern continues. Molecules receiving an electron twitch, ratcheting their orientations forward; molecules losing an electron twitch too, ratcheting their orientations back.
In a living cell we encounter an analogous situation, with pent-up protons replacing pent-up electrons. But it’s a distinction that hardly makes a difference. Protons, like electrons, all carry the same electric charge, and so they also repel one another. When cellular redox reactions pack protons closely together, they too stand at the ready waiting for the chance to rush away from their enforced companions. Cellular redox reactions thus charge up biological proton-based batteries. In fact, because the protons are all clustered on one side of an extremely thin membrane (just a few dozen atoms wide), the electric field (the membrane voltage divided by the membrane thickness) can be enormous, upwards of tens of millions of volts per meter. A cellular bio battery is no slouch.
What, then, do cells do with these mini power stations? Here’s where things get yet more astounding. Attached to the membrane are a great many nanoscale-sized turbines. When the packed protons are allowed to flow back across specific sections of the membrane, they cause the tiny turbines to rotate, much as flowing gusts of air cause windmills to rotate. In centuries past, such wind-powered turning motion was used to crush wheat or other grains into flour. The cellular windmills undertake an analogous grinding project but instead of pulverizing structure the process builds it. As they turn, the molecular turbines repeatedly cram together two particular input molecules (ADP, adenosine diphosphate plus a phosphate group), synthesizing one particular output molecule (ATP, adenosine triphosphate). Forced together by the turbine, the constituents of each resulting ATP molecule are in a tense arrangement: mutually repelling charged constituents are clasped together by chemical bonds, and so, much like a compressed spring, they strain to be released. That’s extraordinarily useful. Molecules of ATP can travel throughout a cell, releasing that stored energy when needed by snapping the chemical bonds and allowing the constituent particles to relax into a lower energy, more comfortable state. It is that very energy, released by the dissociation of ATP molecules, that powers cellular functions.
The tireless activity of these cellular power stations becomes clear when you consider a few numbers. The functions that keep a typical cell alive for just a single second require the energy stored in about ten million ATP molecules. Your body contains tens of trillions of cells, which means that every second you consume on the order of one hundred million trillion (10^20) ATP molecules. Each time an ATP is used, it splits up into the raw materials (ADP and a phosphate), which the proton battery-powered turbines then cram back together into freshly minted, fully rejuvenated ATP molecules. These ATP molecules then hit the road again, delivering energy throughout the cell. To meet your body’s energy demands, your cellular turbines are thus astoundingly productive. Even if you’re an extremely fast reader, as you scan through this very sentence your body is synthesizing some five hundred million trillion molecules of ATP. And just now, another three hundred million trillion more. — Brian Greene
The reason we can't know what its like to experience it, is we have no way of knowing what a 'thing' experiences without being 'that thing'. — Philosophim
It's not a matter of not being able to experience what someone/thing else experiences. The puzzle is why anything has any subjective experience at all. That's the Hard Problem of Consciousness. Why does the physical activity of moving ions, signals moving through neurons, neurotransmitters jumping the gap between neurons, and any and all other physical activity, have a subjective experience?The answer is simple. We are not the particles. We don't know how to have the experience of those particles without being those particles. — Philosophim
His point is that, although the properties can be measured with Precision, but we do not know what that are. We could not know what proto-consciousness is, either, even if we know what it does. Of course we won't be able to measure it with our physical ways of measuring things. What are the measurements of consciousness according to your idealism?But Brian Greene's point is, the physical properties of an electron can be measured with precision. — Wayfarer
I am not trying to "make consciousness something non-physical." Consciousness is non-physical. I'm interested in this particular hypothesis.I don't think we're all that separate from one another. I just view subjective experience as the experience of being physical being over time. In other words, its simply an aspect of the physical, not something separate.
I am curious in terms of motivation, what is the push to make consciousness something non-physical? — Philosophim
There is no analogous further question in the explanation of genes, or of life, or of learning. If someone says “I can see that you have explained how DNA stores and transmits hereditary information from one generation to the next, but you have not explained how it is a gene”, then they are making a conceptual mistake. All it means to be a gene is to be an entitythat performs the relevant storage and transmission function. But if someone says “I can see that you have explained how information is discriminated, integrated, and reported, but you have not explained how it is experienced”, they are not making a conceptual mistake.
This is a nontrivial further question. This further question is the key question in the problem of consciousness. Why doesn’t all this information-processing go on “in the dark”, free of any inner feel? Why is it that when
electromagnetic waveforms impinge on a retina and are discriminated and categorized by a visual system, this discrimination and categorization is experienced as a sensation of vivid red? We know that conscious experience does arise when these functions are performed, but the very fact that it arises is the central mystery. — David Chalmers
Why should it be that consciousness seems to be so tightly correlated with activity that is utterly different in nature than conscious experience? — Donald Hoffman
And within that mathematical description, affirmed by decades of data from particle colliders and powerful telescopes, there is nothing that even hints at the inner experiences those particles somehow generate. How can a collection of mindless, thoughtless, emotionless particles come together and yield inner sensations of color or sound, of elation or wonder, of confusion or surprise? Particles can have mass, electric charge, and a handful of other similar features (nuclear charges, which are more exotic versions of electric charge), but all these qualities seem completely disconnected from anything remotely like subjective experience. How then does a whirl of particles inside a head—which is all that a brain is—create impressions, sensations, and feelings? — Greene
Your other question is, why does it feel like something? That we don't know. and the weird situation we're in in modern neuroscience, of course, is that, not only do we not have a theory of that, but we don't know what such a theory would even look like. Because nothing in our modern mathematics days, "Ok, well, do a triple interval and carry the 2, and then *click* here's the taste of feta cheese. — David Eagleman
It's not just that we don't have scientific theories. We don't have remotely plausible ideas about how to do it. — Donald Hoffman
We don't have a clue. Even those who assume it must be physical, because physical is all we can perceive and measure with our senses and devices, don't have any guesses. Even if he could make something up to explain how it could work, Crick couldn't think of anything.“Can you explain,” I asked, “how neural activity causes conscious experiences, such as my experience of the color red?” “No,” he said. “If you could make up any biological fact you want,” I persisted, “can you think of one that would let you solve this problem?” “No,” he replied, but added that we must pursue research in neuroscience until some discovery reveals the solution. — Donald Hoffman
I think proto-consciousness is a property of matter, just like mass and electric charge are. When the body dies, mass and electric charge are still in the particles. So is proto-consciousness. But there is no longer a thinking brain experiencing itself.Lets say for example that consciousness was something non-physical, but it could never be separated from the body and would cease to be forever when your brain dies. Would you accept that! Or would there be no an insistence that consciousness had some other aspect that made it last beyond bodily death? — Philosophim
I agree. But I don't think all properties are physical.The only avalaible properties are the properties of parts though. — MoK
I gotcha. And I agree, although I don't suspect you would agree with the reason I agree. I think consciousness and thinking/mental are entirely different things. I think consciousness is simply subjective experience, and thinking/mental is something humans are conscious of. So we can talk about mental being a physical process without touching on consciousness.Mental causes are really physical causes so I see no real difference in them than any other cause.
— Philosophim
Is there any need for the word "mental"?
— Patterner
Absolutely. We can't go around calling everything 'physical' all the time in normal conversation. It is a great way to compartmentalize a certain set of physical existence and processes that are different from other physical sets and processes. We need some type of categorization, and we're not going to change the use of the word anytime soon. The issue is that mental processes are still physical processes. As long as you realize that, talking about mental processes is fine. Its when you start to think they exist apart from physical processes as some independent entities that you run into trouble. — Philosophim
