Louis CK says he hates when people say "The N-word." Not the actual word, but "the N-word." Because you're intentionally putting the word into someone's mind. And if you're going to do that, you should have to actually say the word. (He explains it with harsher language.)

17-12=

A young woman and young man, early 20s, run into each other at a party. They don't know each other, but start talking. They are stunned when they realize they lived a couple houses apart about 15 years ago, before the girl's family moved away. The young man says he cried those years ago when he heard she had moved away. He says he remembers that she said she liked brand new, shiny pennies, because they reminded her of the sun.

If you now have a certain word, and/or number, and/or scene of a romantic nature, in your head, was it put there physically? I think the medium of my communication, squiggles on the screen, is physical. But the meaning of the squiggles is not physical. And, since I stopped before the word, number, or scene, I certainly didn't physically put them into your head.

You can identify neural correlates of mental events, but correlation is not identity. — RogueAI

Indeed. The neural correlates are locations.

↪frank I think at that point mathematics wasn’t divorced from the real world yet. Numbers were representations of things. 5 was a representation of 5 things. But what does it mean to talk of 0 things? That’s literally talking about nothing. Negative numbers came even later (if I remember correctly) for the same reason. It is pointless to talk of 0 things and nonsense to talk of negative things. How could you have -3 tables? — khaled

Stand and Deliver is a really good movie. Here's the scene where he talks about 0 and negative numbers.

"Did you ever dig a hole? The sand that comes out of the hole, that's a positive. The hole is a negative."

"Minus 2 plus 2, fill the hole." — Stand and Deliver

But yeah, I doubt anybody ever thought of that before they tried to explain negative numbers.

Already the RNA that transcribes is the "observer — Ulthien

I assumed RogueAI meant an observer with some mental abilities, perhaps even humans. But if considering things your way, then perhaps the answer to the question "To whom do the codons and strings of codons mean amino acids and proteins?" is RNA, or maybe the laws of physics.

With due respect, this discussion misses some 75 years of prior research :P — Ulthien

Darn, I was hoping nobody would notice. :rofl: I am not well read in much of this stuff.

I really like this post btw. — Philosophim

Thank you.

I wouldn't fight you on your alternative proposal. I see the value in knowing that when someone uses the word "consciousness", they mean something specific. It won't be easy to get everyone to go along with this, because "consciousness" is often defined as "subjective experience". But I expect those who only define it as the mental properties humans have would be all in.

Take a bit of DNA outside of it's special little environment and watch it do nothing. — flannel jesus

DNA is never naturally found outside of its special little environment. Taking it out is doing something to prevent its natural function - synthesizing proteins for whatever species it is a part of, not just special humans - from taking place.

2) What "therefore"? If consciousness is fundamental and not emergent then something non-physical is at work, sure. And that something... surely is consciousness? This seems circular? — Dawnstorm

I don't know that everyone who thinks consciousness is not emergent thinks something non-physical is at work. Some may think consciousness is physical. Or maybe another explanation. I'm just saying this is what I think. Something non-physical - something that our sciences cannot deal with - is at work.

3) That seems to be upside down to me. Again, it's true, but only because to have the experience we do is fundamental, and it involves being arranged like we are. Again circular? — Dawnstorm

I'm just restating the old idea that we are not made of matter that is special or different in any way. Same stuff everywhere, same principles apply everywhere.

4) I reality gives us our experience, then reality (whatever that is) is fundamental. I suppose I might have been implying from the beginning that - if consciounsess is fundamental - then reality isn't. It's consciousness that arranges reality. — Dawnstorm

Possibly. It's also possible that consciousness is only one fundamental thing. The reason I think that is that I don't know why consciousness would, if it was the only thing going, develop a reality with properties that are so different from itself that it can't be found in, or explained by, them, and its very existence can be doubted.

That is, unless, you've rowed back on your definition — Dawnstorm

I don't think I have. However, I'm just exploring this whole idea, and I don't have reason to believe I'll come out the other end with exactly the same thoughts I went in with.

My intent with that post was to say, in at least this case, Fundamental is Omnipresent.

↪Patterner it seems fairly obvious to me it's processing information. No?

You accept that DNA is processing information - DNA is chemical dominos as much as anything computers do, including LLMs. If DNA is information processing dominos, LLMs can be too — flannel jesus

I know what you mean, and I'm not sure I have an argument against it. But I still see a difference that feels important. DNA, I suspect all natural information, has an objective goal. Unless something prevents it, something specific will come of it. I wonder if natural information always produces or accomplished something.

Information we make never has a purpose in and of itself. It's always for our use. Possibly for the sake of understanding things, or sharing what we know. Well give it to me to me that give me that give it to me give it to me give me that give me that a camera dirty dog dirty dog George is a dirty dog give me give me joy joy you've had not come get it you bring it to me


That response applies to you, too.

↪Patterner Is information processing possible without an observer to interpret the results? — RogueAI

Yes. DNA is encoded information. The codons and strings of codons mean amino acids and proteins. Using that information, things like the RNAs, aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase, and ribosomes assemble the amino acids and proteins. That's been happening since long before anything observed it.

But not everyone sees it that way. T Clark recently said it's "exactly the same" as the chemical reaction when you mix vinegar and baking soda, though much more complex.

A person using an abacus is processing information with it. Let's say the abacus beads are moving in pattern xyz. What if that same abacus is now falling out of plane and the beads are moving back and forth from air currents also in pattern xyz? Is it processing information? — RogueAI

I'm not comfortable answering this. :rofl: :rofl: I have too many half-baked ideas about information. (I use that phrase because I found a cookie shop in Buffalo today called Half-Baked. OMG.) I'm just throwing ideas around. Trying to make sense for myself. I'd appreciate any thoughts on it.

DNA is natural information. So are all biological information systems. Vision and the other senses. So many others in our bodies we aren't aware of, like our immune system, everything that helps with homeostasis, on and on. Natural information, in it's natural medium, does something. The information means something else, and something comes of it.

Natural information can be encoded in another medium. The information in DNA can be written on paper. But protein will not be synthesized. We can read that information. Most of us will never try to synthesize protein as a result of acquiring that information. Some people do. But nobody has to. Unlike when the information is in its natural form.

Some say the fundamental basis of reality is not matter, or energy, or space, or time. All of those things, and I suppose consciousness, are emergent properties. The true basis of everything is information. Probably mathematical information. In it's natural form, mathematics is certainly doing something. It's doing everything.

Let's just go with that, for the sake of argument. If all that is true, the beads on the abacus might be a human representation of (a veeeeeery^1,000,000,000 tiny bit of) the true basis of all reality. But the "processing of information" that I think is so important is, surely, taking place in the mind of the human manipulating the beads. The abacus isn't doing anything. Not the way DNA and all the biological information processing systems are. It's not the information in it's natural form, any more than DNA's information on paper is.

And I don't think beads that just happened to be blown around into particular patterns are processing information any more than an infinite number of monkeys on typewriters are. Things are going to happen from time to time that look like something significant, but it's not because information was processed. A Boltzmann Brain just happens to come together.

↪Patterner interesting question for you:

Physicalism aside, if consciousness is fundamental, is there something it's like to be an LLM? — flannel jesus

I really don't know enough about them to know if they are what I'm calling "units in regards to consciousness." They could be like dominoes, which are not processing information, regardless of the pattern they are in. Like squiggles in books, regardless of how they are arranged, dominoes, before during or after they fall, don't have any meaning other than what we perceive, which is because we arranged them so we could perceive that meaning. Is ChatGPT more than that? Is a calculator? Chat is obviously much more complex that a calculator, but do the moving patterns of electrons mean things? If not, then it's just a unit to our eyes. All its particles are having subjective experience. But what's the experience of a particle?

If it is processing information, if the moving patterns of electrons mean other things, the way DNA's codons and strings of codons mean amino acids and proteins, the way certain impulses moving through our brains mean photons hitting our retina, then it is experiencing as a unit. Obviously, it's not experiencing all the mental processes we experience. But it's a start.

You did cite unicorns in your earlier post. It is true that my disbelief in them is defeasible. (Most claims about non-existence are.) But your argument is wildly speculative and does not even begin to convince me. Until there is better evidence, I shall continue to classify them as mythical and claim they don't exist, except in the way that mythical creatures (Pegasus, the Gorgons, etc.) exist and not in the way that horses exist. — Ludwig V

Is it not surprising and disappointing that we still don't have words or phrases for such common things, and can only say things like "mythical creatures (Pegasus, the Gorgons, etc.) exist and not in the way that horses exist"?

"X event happend in the past", "Y event will happen in the future", and "Z event is happening now" are all true and all those events are real, hence exist. — Ludwig V

What if Y doesn't happen in the future? An uncountable number of things had been "sure bets" never happened. How can Y be real in the sense that either X or Z are real?

Your link has some great stuff. It's all way beyond me, so it's very possible things are far more than what I just posted in response to RogueAI. I'm generally talking about life forms that came about on Earth through natural processes. In Lights On, Eagleman says:

I think conscious experience only arises from things that are useful to you. You obtain a conscious experience once signals make sense. And making sense means it has correlations with other things. And, by the way, the most important correlation, I assert, is with our motor actions. Is what I do in the world. And that is what causes anything to have meaning. — David Eagleman

That goes along nicely with the quote I've posted so many times, including this thread, from Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged from Chaos, by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam:

A mind is a physical system that converts sensations into action. A mind takes in a set of inputs from its environment and transforms them into a set of environment-impacting outputs that, crucially, influence the welfare of its body. This process of changing inputs into outputs—of changing sensation into useful behavior—is thinking, the defining activity of a mind. — Ogas & Gaddam

The more a living thing moves, the more it comes to refine it's movements, and the more it learns to control it's environment. That goes for moving up the evolutionary tree, and for something like an infant human growing and learning.

But I guess that doesn't mean humans can't make something with real intelligence and understanding in a different way.

But since we're as ignorant as we are, could we be wrong that ChatGPT doesn't understand and isn't conscious? — RogueAI

Could be. Nobody can claim definite knowledge of the subject. There's no way to test any of the theories.

I don't suspect ChatGPT is conscious as a unit. The idea I've been discussing in this thread is that there must be information processing for something to be a unit in regards to consciousness. I don't think ChatGPT processes information. It does from our point of view, because we told it what to do. But is it processing information from its own point of view? I don't see how. When 110101101010001011010010100100 is input, it does what it is required to do with other 0s and 1s, based on it's programming. It doesn't know 001010001...001111101 means a flower. It doesn't know it is providing information for us. It doesn't know it is in communication with us. It doesn't even know it is manipulating 0s and 1s, any more than dominoes know that they are falling in particular patterns because of the way they were arranged, or that they are falling at all.

So I believe all the particles that make up all the parts of ChatGPT - all the wires, other physical parts, and electrons flowing, etc. - are having subjective experiences, because consciousness is fundamental and ubiquitous. But chatGPT is no more a unit in regards to consciousness than a rock is, even if there is much more complicated activity within it than there is in a rock.

A thermostat reacts. It doesn’t decide. It compares a set input (say, 22°C) to the ambient temperature and triggers a mechanism based on that difference. It operates entirely within a pre-defined causal structure: stimulus → comparison → output.

When we perform an experiment, we ask a question about the world and design a process to answer it. There's intentionality, inference, and anticipation involved — ChatGPT

Indeed, there is no decision. There is only one possible course of action, and the thermostat cannot not take it.

What if a tiny critter has a sensor for food, a sensor for poison, and flagella to take it toward food and away from poison. The sensors weigh which sensory input is stronger, and the stronger gets control of the flagellum.

So a decision is made.

Apart from them there is vast nothingness. — prothero

Interesting phrase. Can nothingness be vast?

Could be. Unless they have definitively figured out all about consciousness, no longer debating it the way we do, and would know for sure.

↪RogueAI So anyway, the claim now from you is, if physicalism is true then knowing everything about the physical arrangement of the book should allow you to understand the meaning of the book, even if you don't understand the language it was written in.

I just don't think that follows.

I mean, let's take LLMs as an example. They're a good example because they're explicitly physical. They are implemented 100% in the physical world - the computer scientists who invented them didn't learn how to imbue them with souls or anything, they work on the same physical principles as any normal computer.

Now if you give one of these LLMs a bunch of text in a language they're trained on, they can summarise it for you pretty well.

And if you give them a bunch of text on a language they haven't been trained on, they can't.

So we have a fully physical system which can, loosely speaking, "understand" some stuff and not "understand" other stuff, despite having the same access to the visual characters of each text. So... no I don't think it holds that, if physicalism is true, a person should be able to understand text he hasn't been trained to understand.

Obviously LLMs aren't the same as human beings and a summary from the LLM isn't the same as human understanding. BUT the ability to summarise and paraphrase a text is a human test for understanding, so I think the comparison is honestly robust enough. — flannel jesus

Do you think LLMs understand text? I don't think they have the slightest understanding that the marks on paper, or the binary code that the marks on paper are converted to, mean other things. I don't think they understand what meaning is, even when they are programmed to say they are. I think the binary code reacts in different ways to different binary code that is input, entirely determined by how they are programmed. I think it's very complex dominos.

For any unit to be conscious as a unit, it must be a unit processing energy
— Ulthien (should be Patterner)

..but exactly this "lapsus" made me join here, as it stands true for the binding of the info to sentiency: only the EM quantum field can accomplish this thansposition :) — Ulthien

But I meant to say:

For any unit to be conscious as a unit, it must be a unit processing information.

A ping-pong ball is not a unit in regards to consciousness. It's just a physical arrangement of particles.

A Rube Goldberg Machine is not a unit in regards to consciousness. It's just a bunch of physical arrangements of particles knocking into each other. There is no information anywhere in the system. No part of it means anything.

Dominos set up too reveal whether or not a given number is prime is not a unit in regards to consciousness. There is no information being processed. Dominos are falling in a way that demonstrates something mathematical. But because they were specifically arranged to do that, not because they mean that.

When protein is synthesized, information is processed. The structure of DNA is encoded information. The codons mean amino acids, and the order of the codons means proteins. Proteins are literally assembled. They are stuck together, molecule by molecule, in the specified order. This is the beginning of consciousness of more than individual particles.

For any unit to be conscious as a unit, it must be a unit processing energy. Arrangements of particles must mean something other than the arrangements of particles that they are, and they must be processing that information. So DNA, the beginning of life, is also the beginning of groups of particles that are conscious as a unit.
— Patterner

close, but no cigar. — Ulthien

Argh! Reading your quote of me, I see a mistake. I don't know how I made such an obvious mistake, but "energy" should be "information".

no I have yours and a bunch of other posts to read. Welcome aboard!

Philosophers? Among philosophers everything is always a matter of debate. — T Clark

I disagree.








:joke:

↪Patterner are you the guy who listened to the Annika Harris audio thing with me? — flannel jesus

Yep.

↪SophistiCat I think he wants debates within panpsychism. Which is valid. "If we start with the assumption that pansychism is true, where does that lead us?" I think that's fair. I'm not a panpsychist myself but I think that kind of approach is worth having. It's an exploration of an idea. — flannel jesus

Thank you. It seems some would forbid such discussions.

When your physical body is no longer existent, your mind will also evaporate into thin air. — Corvus

Your mind will be gone pretty much the moment you die.

What do you have in mind by "consciouness being fundamental doesn't imply everything being conscious"? What is the alternative?
— Patterner

Fundamental =/= Omnipresent — Dawnstorm

I forgot this part when I replied. Here's what I'm thinking...

1) Consciousness is fundamental, not emergent from the physical.*

2) Therefore, something non-physical is also at work.

3) There's no reason to think matter everywhere in the universe that is arranged like us would not have the same subjective experience that we have.

4) The non-physical aspect of reality that gives us our subjective experience is doing the same everywhere in the universe.

if that's correct, I think it would have an effect everywhere. As opposed to it being everywhere, but being inactive unless certain conditions are present.


*I'll add this quote to these. From Donald Hoffman's The Case Against Reality Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes, when he was talking to Francis Crick:

“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

We don't have a clue as to how consciousness could emerge from the physical. It's like asking how we could build a house out of liquid water. Worse, in fact, because at least houses and water are both physical things.

Also, I think the term "everything" is problematic in the sense that what appears to us as a unit may not be conscious — Dawnstorm

Yes, it may be a unit only in our eyes. A rock, a stop sign, a cruise ship, a cloud, anything. those are not units in the way I mean, because there is no information processing taking place anywhere. Nevertheless, every particle that makes them up is experiencing. A particle is not experiencing thinking, intelligence, or anything mental. its existence, and therefore what it experiences, is purely physical.

But without body, our consciousness evaporates into nothing. Our brain falls asleep every night, and when it does, the whole world of ours disappears into nothing too until bodies waking up in the morning. Bodies keep on living without conscious minds, but no conscious mind can exist without the living body which it could be emerged from. — Corvus

I agree. Information processing - thinking - is a physical thing. I just posted this on response to :

The physical is things like photons* hitting retina, being converted into electrical signals that go to the brain, trigger a storage mechanism containing a similar pattern of photons* hitting the retina at some point in the past during which the body sustained damage, triggering ..., on and on, and the body moves a certain way that avoids taking damage again.

Is that a description of a mental event? — Patterner

I believe that is a description of a mental event. Photons, vibrations in the air, etc., interact with our sensory apparatus. it is converted into another form - my electric signals. These signals represent the original. That's meaning. Information. That information is processed in the brain (for things that have a brain), and action results. That is thinking. Again, from Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged from Chaos, by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam:

A mind is a physical system that converts sensations into action. A mind takes in a set of inputs from its environment and transforms them into a set of environment-impacting outputs that, crucially, influence the welfare of its body. This process of changing inputs into outputs—of changing sensation into useful behavior—is thinking, the defining activity of a mind. — Ogas & Gaddam

But that is not consciousness. Thinking is a physical process. Thinking can be a more complex physical process than most other physical processes (although not necessarily), but that's what it is.

Consciousness is subjective experience. The subjective experience of this particular kind of physical process is what has usually been considered consciousness. I disagree. I think consciousness is the subjective experience of anything, and this just happens to be what we humans subjectively experience.

For any unit to be conscious as a unit, it must be a unit processing energy. Arrangements of particles must mean something other than the arrangements of particles that they are, and they must be processing that information. So DNA, the beginning of life, is also the beginning of groups of particles that are conscious as a unit.
— Patterner

It now seems like you're not actually saying "everything" is conscious. That's perfectly fine, since consciouness being fundamental doesn't imply everything being conscious. It just feels... different from what I read you saying before (partly due to the rock example, no doubt). — Dawnstorm

That's not what I mean. The key is that I don't think consciousness and thinking/mental activity are related. Human consciousness is the experience of thinking/mental activity. Things that don't have thinking/mental activity, obviously, cannot experience it. But they experienced what they are.

What do you have in mind by "consciouness being fundamental doesn't imply everything being conscious"? What is the alternative?

There may be "things" that don't appear to me as a unit that are conscious. They would be units in themselves, but not for me. — Dawnstorm

Yes. My criteria for "unit" is something that process information. I'm sure there is a lot more information processing going on than I recognized.

going to read the rest of your post a couple more times try to get a better handle on your idea.

But our consciousness is about far more than just our physical bodies.
— Patterner

But without body, our consciousness evaporates into nothing. Our brain falls asleep every night, and when it does, the whole world of ours disappears into nothing too until bodies waking up in the morning. Bodies keep on living without conscious minds, but no conscious mind can exist without the living body which it could be emerged from. — Corvus

I agree. The mind turns off at times, like deep sleep or general anesthesia.

For my philosophical purposes, I further define Consciousness as human subjective experience. That's the only type of awareness we forum posters have experienced first hand. I am skeptical that "everything", including atoms, consciously experience their existence. — Gnomon

My position is that the phrase "consciously experience" is like "visually see". But my guess is you don't mean it that way. I would guess you mean something like knowingly, intellectually, or mindfully experience. Which, of course, humans do. But because we have mental abilities to be conscious of, not because those abilities are consciousness.

I've read various accounts of Maxwell's demon. I don't understand why things I see as problems are not. From The Demon in the Machine, by Paul Davies:

Maxwell assumed that the demon and the shutter are perfectly functioning devices with no friction or need for a power source. This is admittedly an idealization, but there is no known principle preventing an arbitrarily close approach to such mechanical perfection. Remember, friction is a macroscopic property where ordered motion, e.g. a ball rolling along the floor, is converted to disordered motion – heat – in which the ball’s energy is dissipated among trillions of tiny particles. But on a molecular scale, all is tiny. Friction doesn’t exist. — Paul Davies

How can you open and close the shutter without using energy?

Aside from that, the molecules are bouncing around the box, being sorted into one side or the other. But they're not going to continue bouncing around at the same speed forever, are they? Demon will be sorting slower and slower molecules?

So, I ask rhetorically for the nth time, why can't the mental be physical? Why can't the physical be mental? — Manuel

The physical is things like photons* hitting retina, being converted into electrical signals that go to the brain, trigger a storage mechanism containing a similar pattern of photons* hitting the retina at some point in the past during which the body sustained damage, triggering ..., on and on, and the body moves a certain way that avoids taking damage again.

Is that a description of a mental event?

Is the universe intelligible to us other than through minds? Not that we know of. — Manuel

What would intelligibility without minds mean?



*My speech to text said futons. Futons hitting retina is contraindicated.

Basically, what would count as a rock's consciousness would be independent from human category-making. For example, a human breaks a rock. What now? Two consciousnesses where previously there was one? One consciousness as broken rock? Both? Is the world flow constantly splintering off and merging consciousnesses? Does really everything have a concsiousness (regardless of whether it's comprehensible as a unit to a human mind)? — Dawnstorm

I'm suggesting that nothing, not humans or anything else "has a consciousness". Said that way, consciousness is a thing. Rather, everything "is conscious". But yes, i'm saying everything is conscious. However, I've been very unclear shirt something. To get more into the unit idea, I don't really suspect a rock is a conscious unit. I know I've been using it as an example, but I guess to try to get the point across that consciousness isn't a mental thing. Rather, consciousness of people means consciousness of mental things. (And I could be wrong. I could be wrong about the entire thing, after all, so certainly about this. Maybe rocks are consciousness as a unity. But I doubt it.) To be a conscious unity, as opposed to just an object with trillions+ of individually conscious particles, Simple physical proximity isn't enough. A rock is only a unit to a human mind. It is not a unit to itself, or any of its particles. it's just a conglomerate of individual, individually conscious, particles.

For any unit to be conscious as a unit, it must be a unit processing energy. Arrangements of particles must mean something other than the arrangements of particles that they are, and they must be processing that information. So DNA, the beginning of life, is also the beginning of groups of particles that are conscious as a unit.

Quite long ago now, I've come up with a thought experience. Imagine you come across a butterfly sitting on a flower. To you there's a butterfly, a flower, stuff around that that's neiter... all that is intuitive and comprehensible. Now imagine an invisible globe, such that part of the butterfly and flower is in the globe, and part of it is outside of it. That is less intuitive, but due to maths we can imagine it. Now imagine the butterfly taking off and flying away. And now find some sort of mathmatics that allows to recalculate the entire universe such that whatever was within the imagined invisible globe stays a unit. I think that's impossible (from a human perspective), but if we imagine it possible, surely the result would be entirely incomprehensible. However, if the contents of the globe were conscious than there would be an experience that would make this cohere, however incomprehensible this would be to us. And yet it would be the very same world flow that contains our consciousnesses, too. — Dawnstorm

Sorry, I just don't understand your idea.

I'm not sure "subjective experience" works as a definition, mostly because this uproots what "experience" means: you sometimes express sympathy for "felt experience", then you say that a rock "experiences being a rock," but also that rock has no feelings. There's a muddle here that's nearly impossible to deal with if your intuition is foreign to the concept. — Dawnstorm

Legitimate criticism. I don't claim to have every answer or to have thought of every aspect. And I might not always word things clearly. I started this thread because I wanted help examining the topic. So I thank you for this.

Yes, I like "felt experience." Because when it involves some kind of things, it gives feeling. Sometimes feeling in the way we usually mean it. It's not just damage to my skin, it hurts. There's also emotional feeling, like what love feels like. Can I say there's a feeling of seeing blue? Some people say this or that brand of whiskey is smooth.

And I think it feels like something to be me. That feeling is a combination of all the other feelings of every type that I have.

So I think "feel" covers a lot of ground. And that's how I mean it for "felt experience." But I'm not married to it. "Subjective experience" works fine, and is more commonly accepted. Either way, everything experiences it's own existence. You experience many things, and kinds of things, that a rock does not. A rock experiences simple existence. The experience is not of much of anything. But you experience more sensory input, information processing, and feedback loops, all working together so that the unit can affect its environment, and its self, in order to ensure its continuation.

As far as what experience is for a rock, here are some quotes... In this article, Philip Goff writes:

Panpsychism is sometimes caricatured as the view that fundamental physical entities such as electrons have thoughts; that electrons are, say, driven by existential angst. However, panpsychism as defended in contemporary philosophy is the view that consciousness is fundamental and ubiquitous, where to be conscious is simply to have subjective experience of some kind. This doesn’t necessarily imply anything as sophisticated as thoughts.

Of course in human beings consciousness is a sophisticated thing, involving subtle and complex emotions, thoughts and sensory experiences. But there seems nothing incoherent with the idea that consciousness might exist in some extremely basic forms. We have good reason to think that the conscious experiences a horse has are much less complex than those of a human being, and the experiences a chicken has are much less complex than those of a horse. As organisms become simpler perhaps at some point the light of consciousness suddenly switches off, with simpler organisms having no subjective experience at all. But it is also possible that the light of consciousness never switches off entirely, but rather fades as organic complexity reduces, through flies, insects, plants, amoeba, and bacteria. For the panpsychist, this fading-whilst-never-turning-off continuum further extends into inorganic matter, with fundamental physical entities – perhaps electrons and quarks – possessing extremely rudimentary forms of consciousness, which reflects their extremely simple nature.

In this Ted Talk, Chalmers says:

Even a photon has some degree of consciousness. The idea is not that photons are intelligent, or thinking. You know, it’s not that a photon is wracked with angst because it’s thinking, "Aaa! I'm always buzzing around near the speed of light! I never get to slow down and smell the roses!" No, not like that. But the thought is maybe the photons might have some element of raw, subjective feeling. Some primitive precursor to consciousness.

In Panpsychism in the West, Skrbina writes:

Minds of atoms may conceivably be, for example, a stream of instantaneous memory-less moments of experience.

I don't like Skrbina's use of "mind" in this way. I think there needs to be thinking to have a mind. Even if only the very beginnings of thinking, as described in Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged from Chaos, by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam:

A mind is a physical system that converts sensations into action. A mind takes in a set of inputs from its environment and transforms them into a set of environment-impacting outputs that, crucially, influence the welfare of its body. This process of changing inputs into outputs—of changing sensation into useful behavior—is thinking, the defining activity of a mind.

Accordingly, every mind requires a minimum of two thinking elements:
•​A sensor that responds to its environment
•​A doer that acts upon its environmen — Ogas and Gaddam

I'll respond to more of your post.

How does "everything experiences" happen? A rock, a tree, a comatose person – what's the mechanism by which each of them "experiences" at all? — 180 Proof

I don't know the answer to what I think you are asking. I don't know that it could ever be known. After all, Brian Greene wrote, "I don’t know what mass is. I don’t know what electric charge is. What I do know is that mass produces and responds to a gravitational force, and electric charge produces and responds to an electromagnetic force. So while I can’t tell you what these features of particles are, I can tell you what these features do." If we don't know what those things are, which are in the purview of our sciences, and are measured with incredible precision, how much harder would it be to find this answer?

Also, if "the brain" doesn't produce "consciousness", as you say, Patterner, then what accounts for (e.g.) every amputee's phenomenon of phanthom pain? — 180 Proof

I don't know any detail about what is happening in the brain in these cases. I assume signals are being manufactured in the brain that mimic signals associated with pain that the brain received when the limb was there?

How then, do you define Consciousness? — Gnomon

Consciousness is subjective experience. That's all. Everything experiences it's own existence.

Very few posters on this forum are aware that physicists can now transform data (information) into energy and vice-versa. — Gnomon

I certainly was not. I'll look at your link. Sounds like an amazing topic.

Yes. :rofl: I am trying to respond to as many as I can at the end of a long day, working on 5 hours of sleep, and my alarm is going off again in 6 hours. You are correct. I misinterpreted you.

So you are looking at the univserse as a clockwork machine without the input of consciousness? — I like sushi

No, that is not my view. A clockwork machine would not have made skyscrapers, computers, nuclear bombs, or the Hoover Dam. It would not have written Shakespeare's works, The Malazan Book of the Fallen, The Bible, or Gilgamesh. It would not contain the works of Bach, The Beatles, or Steely Dan. I'm saying the universe is not a clockwork machine because consciousness is a part of it.

I am mostly of the mind that the very term consciousness is far too nebulous for current purposes. — I like sushi

I believe it is very basic. Nothing more than experience. I think many things usually thought of as consciousness are actually what is being experienced.

Is there some right answer to what you should identify with? — frank

I wouldn't think so. But I don't know what you're getting at.

But I'm not saying everything is consciousness. I'm saying everything is consciousness.
— Patterner

Typing mistake here, I assume? Or else you're getting super woo-woo. :smile: — J

Yes. Typo. :grin: I literally never use anything but my cell phone, usually swiping. I do try to proofread, but don't always do the best job.

You say that 'consciousness is fundamental'. In order to have a meaningful discussion it's also IMO important to clarify what we mean by 'consciousness' and provide a clear model for it. Do you think that, for instance, there is one fundamental consciousness or that there are many distinct consciousnesses? Do you think that any composite object has its own consciousness or only some composites have consciousness? — boundless

I'm not sure if you're asking two different questions, or if you are asking the same question in two different ways. My answer to the second, and possibly both, is that everything experiences. When I step on the nail, my foot experiences with the damage. But I, as a whole, also experience it. My foot takes the actual damage, but it is not what feels the pain. It is not what remembered a similar injury from years ago. It is not what worries about tetanus.

Sorry for the many questions, but I'd like to understand more your view. — boundless

No problem! I would also like to understand my view more. :grin:

Let's concede that, indeed, in some sense there is consciousness in both cases. My question is: is the 'consciousness' of a 'dead person' the same entity of the 'consciousness' of the 'living person' before she died? Is the 'consciouesness' of the 'anesthetized person' the very same entity of the 'consciousness' of the person when she was in a normal, waking state? Do the 'dead person' and 'anesthetized person' have a unitary, private experience? — boundless

There is a vast difference between the experience of a human whose brain/body is functioning typically and the same human brain/body that is either dead or anesthetized. The dead and anesthetized do not have mental processes, thinking, information processing, feedback loops... The anesthetized does have some of these things to some degree, because the autonomic systems process information and give feedback, and I suppose other things. But there are no mental processes, no thinking.

Notice that the 'privateness' of our experience, of our 'consciousness' is something to be addressed even in a panpsychist model. If all my constituents have their own 'consciousness', how does that explain the arising of 'my' consciousness, which seems separate from 'theirs'? — boundless

A human being is a unit. The leg is separate from the head, both are separate from the lungs, all are separate from the finger, etc. However, they are a unit. And that unit experiences as a unit. Various processes taking place in the brain are experienced as awareness and self-awareness. But stepping on a nail is also part of our consciousness.

Let me suggest that physical material, the physical universe (that we know, I’ll call it X) is an artificial construct. That the real world Y is immaterial, there are things, beings, space, time, things happen, just like in X, but there is no physical material. In Y there is an equivalent to material, because there are forms and there is extension in time and space. But this material is composed of ideas, concepts, axioms, consciousness and experiences. Things that we typically (here in X) see as mental states and processes. — Punshhh

Why is X constructed? If the equivalent of everything we know in X is already present in Y, then why do we need X?

I thank you for your words. I'm grateful you think I expressed my idea well.

But what if consciousness is not something static, like a property or essence, but a dynamic process that manifests itself only in systems that can actively interact with the world? — Astorre

That's certainly a possibility. I'm suggesting something different.

If consciousness is a process associated with dynamics (for example, perception, feedback or choice), then a stone whose existence is static and determined by external physical laws may not need consciousness. — Astorre

I am suggesting need had nothing to do with consciousness. It is present, in all things.

Even if we assume that he has some kind of "experience," it does not affect his being - unlike, say, a person or animal, where consciousness is associated with adaptive processes. — Astorre

I think the adaptive processes are what is being experienced. They would take place without any subjective experience, if reality did not have an experiential property.