↪Gnomon
:yikes: — Wayfarer

Sorry. I didn't mean to embarrass you with deep-felt praise. But, on this forum, you're my hero. :blush:

Well, gosh, thanks Gnomon, very kind of you to say so.

It's used as if to suggest that because something is conscious it deserves to be treated with essential rights. We respect the lives of humans more than animals and sponges, because of factors extending beyond the idea that they have consciousness. — kudos

I am not using "panpsychism" in such a way. I am using it in its usual sense that "experientialness" is spread across matter in some way (whether through simple "occasions of experience" all the way up to something like Schopenhauer-style neutral monism).

It is just for the very reason that one cannot tell what beings are conscious agents except by certain cues, and that's really all we mean when we use the word; it is a word for a phenomenological agent by definition. — kudos

Well sure. "What" counts as the most basic existing phenomenological agent and why are the relevant questions I am asking. When @Wayfarer created this thread from another one, I actually said if he was going to do that, it would be better to specifically name it "Transcendentalism of Neurofauna". I meant it. That is to say, we should take a deep dive into what it is about certain animals that have neurons/neural systems for why they have internal "what it's like" experiences. The dividing line is somewhere between sponges/worms/jellyfish/insects. Well, having an "eye spot" for example. WHENCE is that? We can describe it, but what is it about this sensory physical feature that now has an animal "online" if you will (has phenomenal experiences)?

Which we now consider common sense. Unless you take the view that the activity of matter depends on or is directed by it, which is another story. To suggest otherwise would be as homunculus as you can possibly get. That there is a little man with the controls inside who is seeing existence unfiltered, and he decides whether or not to think or consider things independently, and is thus controlled by another homunculus ad infinitum as far as I understand the concept. — kudos

Common sense? Ask any "common sense" scientist or even non-scientist, most people are inclined not to give "dead" matter any form of experiential qualities. That comes with biological systems (and neural ones at that), or at the least sufficiently complex functional systems (e.g. the possibility for AI, for example).

Well sure. "What" counts as the most basic existing phenomenological agent and why are the relevant questions I am asking.

So you are interested in right. What right we grant such an agent, and what constitutes right to such an agent. We are talking about agreement between humans about what’s like us, and what’s not like us. The only way to know ‘what it’s like,’ would be to define said quality based on human experience and determine if it is there or not. There is no way to tell if we have actually captured any sort of moral ‘what it’s likeness.’ That would be the kind of knowledge that actually means something.

I have great trepidation about what would happen if people really thought they knew ‘what it’s like’ to be another being. Namely because there is no a way for a computer program to truly know it’s own errors in the sense that humans do. It entails actuality.