We only have one point of reference for ‘consciousness’. Anything else in some other time/space is not ‘conscious’ in any reasonably comparable manner unless such a being possesses a host of common features to humans. — I like sushi
You clearly miss the point of what panpsychism is as an idea. It is NOT necessarily about the ‘universe’ being conscious. — I like sushi
Panpsychism is the view that mentality is fundamental and ubiquitous in the natural world. — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/
Panpsychism is the belief that every thing has an internal mental aspect. — Daemon
It seems odd that folk suppose consciousness to somehow be central to the nature of the universe when it is so easily dissipated in one's lounge chair on a slow Sunday afternoon. Sleep should cure one of panpsychism. — Banno
It's not clear to me why emergence would require "degree" — Daemon
perhaps consciousness is a property of space. This has some intuitive appeal for me as it fits with the phenomenology quite well.
— "Bert1
How do you mean? — Daemon
The IIT is a very different kind of panpsychism, and very differently theoretically motivated.
— Bert1
I've looked into that, in my opinion it's a total failure. — Daemon
It doesn't necessarily require it, but it is very hard to think of a non-gradual, instant change in a system that could plausibly be associated with the emergence of consciousness. — bert1
I do like it when discussions of consciousness take seriously such phenomenological intuitions and reflections. — bert1
Consciousness feels container like, it feels still and relatively unmoving (or sometimes does) — bert1
I don't see why robotic entities can't be created through non-biological processes. — RogueAI
Well, my idea is that there is something special about biological entities, in that they are separated from their environment. That's what I mean when I say they have an inside and an outside. And a robot isn't separated from its environment in the necessary way. — Daemon
I could say "consciousness sometimes feels heavy so maybe it's a property of gravity". Just nonsense, sorry. — Daemon
Life has a drive to evolve systems of increasing complexity, and at some point Chance thought of a mechanism for feeling. It seems likely that would be a development of an existing non-conscious mechanism. — Daemon
the only causation we actually know happens is psychological - we cause our arm to go up, for example. But this seems to compete with other, physical, causal accounts involving neurons firing.
— Bert1
Descriptions at two different levels. That's good. The more distinctions, the more we understand. What's the problem? — Daemon
There's not, I submit, any "will" in this scenario either. It looks like will, but the real driver is chance, natural selection. Only organisms equipped with the biochemical machinery that gets them swimming in the right direction will survive. — Daemon
The difficulty with the idea of two levels of description is that it creates a dualism, and imports many of the difficulties of that. — bert1
The next question is: at what point in the evolutionary process did feeling first emerge? This is a hypothesis at the moment. How are we going to narrow down the possibilities? If we want to take a scientific approach, how do we test a system for the presence of consciousness?
Is it when the cell wall developed? — bert1
Your intuition that what is necessary for consciousness that there be an inside and an outside is very interesting, as that is suggestive of the creation of two points of view, that of the subject (from the inside) and that of the external observer (from the outside). Is that where you are coming from? — bert1
But when we ask for finer and finer details, we get to forces, and 'no further explanation is possible, we are just describing what happens'. That's where I suggest a further step is possible, and perhaps even necessary, and that is to say that the observed behaviour is the result of will. The idea is that physical explanations of the bacterium's behaviour is, at least, reducible to psychological explanations. — bert1
What motivates panpyschism? — OP
But why should that be necessary? — Daemon
What's the motivation for your introduction of the psyche, when the process can be explained without it? — Daemon
Indeed, what does motivate panpsychism? — Agent Smith
I thought this was well known? The motivation is bound up in the problem of understanding ‘consciousness’. That there are many different people taking up the idea of panpsychism with various other motivations attached is secondary to the original point of trying to understand consciousness right? — I like sushi
It can't be explained, just described. — bert1
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