Returning to the central issue: Does a rock have consciousness? If you say it does, then one can define consciousness as "A property possessed by a rock." If you say it doesn't, then the question becomes "why doesn't it?" If your answer is "A rock has no brain" , then you are a physicalist and must rethink your existence. :chin:

Why? — Banno

Because phenomenal consciousness does not admit of degree.

The argument for this?

Because phenomenal consciousness does not admit of degree. — bert1

"Here is how Block introduces the notion of phenomenal consciousness:
P-consciousness [phenomenal consciousness] is experience. P-conscious properties are experiential properties. P-conscious states are experiential, that is, a state is P-conscious if it has experiential properties. The totality of the experiential properties of a state are “what it is like” to have it. Moving from synonyms to examples, we have P-conscious states when we see, hear, smell, taste and have pains. (Block 1995: 230)" A. Byrne

There are many degrees of seeing, hearing, smelling and tasting.

↪bert1 The argument for this? — Banno

I can't think of any examples of borderline cases of consciousness. If one thinks that consciousness emerges, say in the development of an embryo, then there is a change from the embryo not experiencing anything at all (not conscious), to the embryo experiencing something (conscious). But the distinction between nothing and something in this context must be sharp, no? What could a middle ground between something and nothing possibly be? If you can think of an example, please let me know.

There are many degrees of seeing, hearing, smelling and tasting. — jgill

I heartily agree, and you are right to point out this contradiction between me and Block (at least in this bit you quoted, I can't find the original article off hand). I apologise, it is a long time since I read Block and I did not realise he had defined consciousness in this way. Block does indeed explicitly identify consciousness with experience, and I think this is a mistake. For me, the accurate way to think about this is to say that experience is an amalgam of consciousness plus content. Block defines consciousness here by listing examples of experiences, rather than identifying consciousness with what all the experiences have in common, by virtue of which they are experiences. I should perhaps not use the term 'phenomenal consciousness' after all as it is likely to cause this confusion.

So, to clarify, there are infinite degrees of what we experience (content), but no degrees between not being able to experience at all (i.e. the condition most people think rocks are in) and being able to experience something.

but no degrees between not being able to experience at all (i.e. the condition most people think rocks are in) and being able to experience something. — bert1

Consciousness is frequently conflated with awareness. I recall psychological experiments that illustrate someone being conscious of an impending threat, but unaware of it. One's body reacts an instant before one is actually aware of the threat. However, usually the two are perceived to be the same. One could stretch the definition of consciousness to the ability to use information to one's advantage, like a flower turning toward the sun. But is the flower aware?

Consciousness is frequently conflated with awareness. I recall psychological experiments that illustrate someone being conscious of an impending threat, but unaware of it. — jgill

OK, so in your terms, I am talking about awareness in this thread. I mean by 'consciousness' what you mean by 'awareness'. I'm a panpsychist in the sense that I think everything is aware, including flowers and rocks.

Are flowers and rocks self-aware?

I'm not sure what you mean, but if you mean aware that they are aware of being aware, then I doubt it.

EDIT: I said the opposite of what I meant to say. Fixed.

So awareness is being judged by consciousness' seeming premonitory ability to react to a threat?

Awareness for a human usually implies a sense of self, an "I". In the practice of Zen this "I" is seen to be a fabrication. But in the Art of Dreaming one becomes this "I" entirely, with apparent free will.

I doubt flowers are blessed with this experience. How would you describe the awareness of a rock?

I don't think awareness implies self-awareness, i.e. awareness of awareness.

I don't know what a rock might feel. Nothing very interesting I suspect.

So awareness is being judged by consciousness' seeming premonitory ability to react to a threat? — neonspectraltoast

I don't think so, but jgill might.

So awareness is being judged by consciousness' seeming premonitory ability to react to a threat? — neonspectraltoast

Not judged, merely separated. But this is only one point of view. Most would have consciousness=awareness. It becomes a word game.

I tend to disagree. I believe there is an entire subconscious that is wholly a part of our lives that we aren't aware we're aware of. Waking life isn't everything.

I doubt few would disagree with the existence of subconscious. Experiments show that decisions bubble up from those levels, making the concept of free will debatable.

that we aren't aware we're aware of — neonspectraltoast

??

That we aren't aware of, maybe? :chin:

This is a long thread so If I have repeated anything please let me know.

@-Bert1

"The idea of phenomenal consciousness is that no matter how vague and insubstantial your content of consciousness is, you are still conscious, because you are aware of something, whatever it is. And that is all that is needed to fulfil the definition, so you are fully conscious in the phenomenal sense. (NOT in the medical sense like Banno keeps returning to - that sense indeed admits of any number of degrees.) So the idea is that anything is either phenomenally conscious or not, there is no middle ground, there is no partial consciousness, there are no borderline cases, there exist no states, functions, configurations or whatever in which it is indeterminate as to whether a thing is conscious or not." — Bert1

If phenomenal consciousness is only 'awareness of something' then it is possible to be aware of very little content and / or modes of content. So, say one can only hear or not hear. There is no degree in volume or tambre, etc. But what then is awareness? What is the "what it's like to be" of this sound, however rudimentary? It sems to me (in my ignorance) that both emergence and panpsychism offer little to this question. No philosophical position tackles this well, even if we claim seperate realms between the physical and mental.

There are still questions about what this 'awareness is, where it comes from, and how it comes to be (if it comes to be at all). My intuition says - oddly enough- that there is something about our intuitions on this subject which force us into the wrong direction. Can philosophy avoid enough intuition (is logic an intuition?) to tackle consciousness? Some here have mentioned Wiggenstein's view that it's all word games. Will tackling the questions of consciousness force philosophy to reexamine itself and the way it operates? It seems there is a strange loop that endevour.

Can we state that awareness is not self-awareness if we do not yet understand what awareness is? I feel there is a bit of the multiple drafts theory by Dennett in self-awareness and awareness 'proper'.

I am not a fan of Block's distinction or definition of P-consciousness. I think you and I may be closely aligned with Drestke's interpretation consciousness.

I can't think of any examples of borderline cases of consciousness. If one thinks that consciousness emerges, say in the development of an embryo, then there is a change from the embryo not experiencing anything at all (not conscious), to the embryo experiencing something (conscious). But the distinction between nothing and something in this context must be sharp, no? What could a middle ground between something and nothing possibly be? If you can think of an example, please let me know. — bert1

I agree with you I think. Confusion with this goes back again to awareness and access to content and modes of awareness (consciousness?). We get caught up in the massive amounts of content and modes that consciousness can play with, and we misunderstand those as gradients.

So let's say the consciousness of an embryo starts off as an awareness of an on and off, two options. As it develops into a more integrated and complex (information) 'system' it somehow develops a larger repertoire of options to be aware of. It can now see and separate (or the world enables it to see and separate if you are an externalist) what it sees into objects. Eventually, with language, it can experience concepts. But all of those still follow a nothing to something jump. A good example of the confusion might be the following. Dichromatic vision to Trichromatic vision is not a step up in the gradient of chromatics. It is dichromatic or not dichromatic, or trichromatic and not trichromatic.

Let me know if this offers anything to the discussion or if there is something I've left out, etc.

Are we conscious? If so what we call ‘consciousness’ is in fact just ourselves being aware of ourselves as ‘conscious’.

From this basic linguistic assumption panpsychism is a no goer.

The confusion in this general area appears to be an array of what are intrinsically opposing ideas about what ‘panpsychism’ is.

I imagine we all appreciate what temperature is? If so do we all accept that temperature is merely our appreciation of interacting molecules but NOT a property of a single molecule - because temperature is emergent.

I think it makes sense to view consciousness in this way rather than trying to slap some non-applicable ‘temperature’ on a molecule.

We are conscious. A rock isn’t. Just like we have a temperature, but a molecule doesn’t.

Are we conscious? If so what we call ‘consciousness’ is in fact just ourselves being aware of ourselves as ‘conscious’. — I like sushi

I don't understand this at all. Can you elaborate?

I thought that’s what I did after that opening.

Basically if what we ‘experience’ - our ‘experiencing’ - is what we call consciousness, how is this any different from our ‘experiencing’ of temperature?

Keep in mind that a molecule has no temperature, our ‘experience’ is expressed in the phenomenon of temperature (feeling hot and cold). In this sense ‘consciousness’ is just a name we give to experiencing something and there is nothing to suggest that ‘heat’ or ‘consciousness’ exists in a molecule - the terms literally have no meaning at that level.

From that principle ‘panpsychism’ is a no goer. Any rational approach would be more willing to accept that the interactions of certain cells leads to ‘consciousness’ at some point. I’m willing to be open to the suggestion of some proto/pre-conscious states leading to the emergence of what we term as ‘consciousness’.

Some people push it too far imo. To me some things I hear online in this area equate to someone saying a Table is the same thing as a Banana, when they say electrons are conscious, by covering up this with claims that it’s just a different kind of conscious. That is what I find to be nonsense in the sense that a Table is just a different kind of Banana ... No! It just isn’t.

I am going to be late to the party as usual. Philosophy like politics has a wide variety of viewpoints and a number of different proposed solutions to the same problems (assuming one can agree on the problem to start with).

I promote a variety of panpsychism although I prefer the term panexperientialism for the form of panpsychism which fits into my larger worldview. I think language is important and I try to avoid using terms like “consciousness” in ways that violate the common uses and understandings of the term. Language is imprecise and it is important to try to agree on definitions lest discussions become more disputes about usage of words than about ideas.

I come to panpsychism via a more fundamental philosophy which is basically Whiteheads process philosophy. In that philosophy the most fundamental units of reality are “events” (occasions or droplets of experience) what Whitehead calls “actual occasions”. Thus one talks about “quantum events” not “quantum particles”. About the world as a continuous creative becoming not a “being”, about properties as relationships between events not as inherent aspects of inert entities. The distinction between primary and secondary properties is thought of as a fundamental mistake in philosophy, an artificial bifurcation of nature.

Coming from this type of process ontology as a fundamental worldview a form of panpsychism is almost an inevitable conclusion. Having given this brief introduction and cursory overview of my fundamental worldview, I will comment on some of the posts from the thread just to try to give a different perspective, use of language and point of view. I am not here to convince anyone of anything. I do not think the purpose of philosophy is to win arguments only to familiarize yourself with different possibilities or explanations for “reality”.

If you want to be a panpsychist, the best way to do so is to attack emergentism as hard as you can. If you can say that emergentism isn't true, and that consciousness is real, then you can say that consciousness is fundamental.
— Pneumenon
I regard consciousness to be a relatively rare form of unified integrated (self aware and self reflective experience). I think humans and other higher animals can be regarded as “conscious” in the way we usually use the term. I think all of nature is “experiential” and thus experience is fundamental and consciousness or mind differ not in kind from experience but in degree. Different physical arrangement give different physical properties and the same can be said for arrangements of experiential units. Thus human consciousness requires an intact functioning human brain. I am a neutral monist of sorts the fundamental units of nature “occasions of experience” are unified integrated physical-protoexperiential units. To say they are conscious is to twist the usual interpretation of the world “conscious”.

So a sophisticated panpsychist might point out that if a cognitive scientists were to say "At X time, in this part of the brain, there is an "integration" that is happening which causes the emergence of consciosness".. the part about "causing emergence" becomes its own explanatory gap that needs to be explain. What is this emergence of consciousness itself besides that of being correlated with the integration of brain states? Schopenhauer1
This is the “combination problem” of panpsychism. How do the individual units of experience or mind combine to form a higher level of awareness or mind. I do not see it as fundamentally different from the way in which different physical combinations (like molecules, have different properties than their individual constituent “atoms”). Consciousness is a form of unified integrated experience and requires a complex integrated structure, system or process to support it.

@Pfhorrest said that the three basic options are:
1) Nothing is conscious (eliminativism)
2) Some things are conscious (emergentism)
3) Everything is conscious (panpsychism)
I do not think experience, mind and consciousness arise from fundamental constituents which are inert entirely physical and devoid of any psychic subjective or affective aspect themselves. So I fund panpsychism to be more plausible (in some form) than the alternatives.

That is the equivalent of what is being claimed of neuro-biological processes. You see.. physical, chemical, physical chemical physical chemical, more physical chemical physical chemical. WHAM!!! EXPERIENCE!!! Something is not right there.-Schopenhauer1
Which is why I think experience (non-conscious experience) is an aspect of the most fundamental units of nature “events” or “actual occasions” in Whiteheads terms.

So whilst the panpsychist holds that mentality is distributed throughout the natural world—in the sense that all material objects have parts with mental properties—she needn’t hold that literally everything has a mind, e.g., she needn’t hold that a rock has mental properties (just that the rock’s fundamental parts do)." Italics added.- Tim Wood
Rocks are simple aggregates that lack the integrated or complex structure which would give rise to any form of unified or integrated, or conscious experience. Hardly any serious presentation of panpsychism would hold that “rocks are conscious” and as an argument against panpsychism it represents a failure to grasp the fundamentals of the philosophical presentation.

If one assumes there are degrees of consciousness, from zero to partial to full, then one may conclude a rock has zero degree and a bright, functioning human has over ninety degrees when fully awake. If one assumes partial consciousness does not exist, then when we awaken there is no continuity and its like a light being switched on instantly. Is that possible? More likely, consciousness underlies everything, always there, and we become aware of it. Jgill
I think most experience is non- conscious experience, there are long presentations about “Whiteheads Unconscious Ontology” and “Non Conscious Experience in Whitehead” that I will not bore you with. Experience comes in forms and degrees but not differences in kind and experience is fundamental to a process view of nature. Most human experience I would argue is non-conscious experience. Our conscious experience is only the tip of the iceberg (the flashlight) of our mental processing and perception. Most of our mental processing is non-conscious and not under conscious control and outside the realm of conscious awareness.

I also brought up the idea that maybe properties are not "real" as in, inhering in the matter arrangements or matter itself, but observer-dependent. I've also mentioned this theory goes back to Locke and earlier, but Locke arbitrarily split primary and secondary properties. Of course, Kant has a full blown theory of it, but his "categories" are a bit too much of speculative idealism. Schopenhauer1
The division of properties into primary and secondary is one of the fundamental mistakes in the interpretation of nature an “artificial bifurcation of nature” as Whitehead would phrase it. The red and warmth of the sun are as “real” as much a part of reality as wavelengths and photons (perhaps more), you cannot pick and choose. There is always more to “reality” than what can be objectively measured and quantified.

From that principle ‘panpsychism’ is a no goer. Any rational approach would be more willing to accept that the interactions of certain cells leads to ‘consciousness’ at some point. I’m willing to be open to the suggestion of some proto/pre-conscious states leading to the emergence of what we term as ‘consciousness’. I like sushi
Precisely there are different degrees and forms of experience just as there are different measured physical properties depending on the structure of the system under observation.. Using the term “consciousness” causes an unnecessary resistance to the concept of panpsychism because the way we usually use consciousness is to describe our own self aware, self reflective, language oriented awareness and we do not attribute that degree or form of experience to all of nature.

Question to you, Gnomon: Are you an endorser and apologist for the substance of this article by Goff? Do you stand for him? — tim wood

In short, NO.

I'll defend my own ideas, but not those of a philosopher perfectly capable of defending himself. :smile:


Panpsychism :
In popular usage, this term is taken to mean that even stones and atoms are conscious in the same sense that humans are. But that’s nonsense. In my theory it only means that the potential for emergent consciousness is included in the energy / information that constitutes those elementary Objects. The elementary mind-stuff eventually emerges as self-consciousness in holistic Selves.
https://qz.com/1184574/the-idea-that-everything-from-spoons-to-stones-are-conscious-is-gaining-academic-credibility/

That’s just stating the physical reality of the world isn’t it? In the correct configuration any bunch of subatomic particles has the potential to form into a human.

Precisely there are different degrees and forms of experience just as there are different measured physical properties depending on the structure of the system under observation.. Using the term “consciousness” causes an unnecessary resistance to the concept of panpsychism because the way we usually use consciousness is to describe our own self aware, self reflective, language oriented awareness and we do not attribute that degree or form of experience to all of nature. — prothero

OK. A rock has zero experience. Oh oh, there it goes, rolling down a hill! Guess it has >0 experience.

:gasp:

Rocks as simple aggregates would not be expected to have any unified experience. I think calling a rock "conscious" is part of what makes "panpsychism" seem silly to a lot of people. Asserting the individual constiuents of rocks "quantum events" have some form of non-conscious proto-experience is an entirely different matter.
You will have to expound on your point as I am not entirely sure what you intend to convey.

Asserting the individual constiuents of rocks "quantum events" have some form of non-conscious proto-experience is an entirely different matter. — prothero

I'm not sure I understand why we even use expressions like "consciousness" or "experience" when speaking of non-living entities. Do the planets have the "experiences" of revolving about the sun? Does a virtual particle - which may only be a mathematical device - have "consciousness" or "experience"? Do quarks have free will? Why is it important for some people to apply these and similar words removed from a context of living beings? :chin:

Because some senses of those words have been used in a way that is completely divorced from any physical behavior or functionality that we might use to distinguish humans or other living things from rocks or quarks, instead being used for some mysterious metaphysical thing. And as it turns out, there’s nothing metaphysically special about humans or other living things, which means whatever’s metaphysically going on with us is also going on with everything else. Not that that really means much, since it’s such a trivial thing.

E.g. if free will is just the absence of determination then every electron has free will. That makes it clear that that is a pretty useless sense of “free will”, but it’s nevertheless a sense to that lots of people use, and it’s true that in that sense of the phrase, electrons “have free will”, not that that really means much.