Why is reduction-to-panpsychism sufficient to banish consciousness as computation?
Maybe every brick has consciousness, what matters to humans is whether it's a consciousness that we can communicate with. We don't care about consciousnesses with orthogonal arrows of time, or consciousnesses with nothing to say or no way to say it in our universe. We're after a compatible kind of consciousness.
It seems to me that the requirement that consciousness itself be a physical phenomenon is too strong. It's just that in order for us to notice, it must have physical I/O.
Well, there is no proof of Consciousness as Epiphenomenon that's why Panpsiquism is gaining traction. If Consciousness is not Computation, then we need a better framework.
> Panpsychism gives us a way of resolving the mystery of consciousness, a way that avoids the deep difficulties that plague more conventional options.
Eh, not really. With panpsychism you end up with, e.g. human, consciousness often becoming an emergent property of complex-enough systems. But in reality, you might have systems that are quite complicated (say, more complicated than a brain even) that aren't conscious. I do think that consciousness is most likely a "foundational" property of our universe, but the argument that "everything is conscious" (even to a tiny degree) doesn't seem very useful.
Panpsychism doesn't claim that everything has complex sensory perception, higher reasoning, memory, etc. The hard problem isn't about any of those things, which indeed have clear neuronal correlates and can easily be turned off.
The idea is that there's always "something that it's like to be X", where X can equally be a conscious human, an anesthetized human, a dead human, or an electron.
I think the hard problem is primarily why we have consciousness, and why it evolved versus us just being automatons controlled by our brains, more so than the physical mechanism by which it is implemented, though I sometimes see it presented as both.
Thankfully we don't need to solve the hard problem to say that computers don't have it. But I don't see why consciousness is "by definition something incapable of expression through ordinary physical relations". What definitionally makes consciousness prohibited by the physical world?
Why would computational explanations of consciousness be more ridiculous than the non-explanation that is asserting everything is conscious in some way (which is basically what panpsychism means)?
You are right. It is sort of similar to the "other minds" problem. There are no ironclad arguments against a car engine not being conscious, though it seems obvious. You can have more fun of this sort reading this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism
The SEP article below is probably the best I can find right now which talks about almost all viewpoints.
There is an extremely good and entertaining argument in Penrose's book Shadows of the Mind against consciousness being computational (but the book has quite a good number of flaws in its other arguments).
From a reductionist and materialistic physical standpoint we only have fundamental particles and the forces in the universe. None of these seem to be related to consciousness. It is seems magical to say that these particles then interact in complex ways to produce something fundamentally new.
David Chalmers [1], the guy who came up with the hard problem, has written a lot on this.
I recently finished watching Prof. Patrick Grim's excellent Mind-Body Philosophy[0] course, which helped me clarify my own position. I thought that it fit reasonably well under the term "panpsychism", but this article is making me think it may be something slightly different. Under the expectation that it has already been studied, I'm now curious what it is named.
In short, I am a computationalist[1]: consciousness is a pattern that may appear in physical processes. I expect it can be translated into different physical processes. I think the definitional boundary separating conscious processes from other processes is subjective, even if there are common landmarks we generally agree are on one side or the other.
That seems all well and good. However I am not a hard materialist[2]: I do not believe that physicalism addresses the hard problem of consciousness[3]. I like to note this by the absence of timelessness in my experience: the present moment seems to be distinguished from the perceived past and future only because I am experiencing it. Contrast this to a physical description or model of myself and my surroundings that seems sound without reference to a specific "present" moment. To see that such a model does not contain a "now", think about simulating it: you would need to choose a moment on the timeline to start, to insert a "now". Physical models don't seem to capture the notion of "present moment". Attempts to shoe-horn it in (with e.g. consciousness particles or what have you) seem simultaneously untestable and offensive to Occam's razor.
Subjective experience then seems to be unaccounted for. I am content saying it is not found in any model of physical processes, only in the physical processes themselves. Notice I am no longer talking about consciousness: the computation and brain state is still susceptible to description. Only the subjective experience, whose toe we can catch with the present moment, escapes.
Odd as it might sound, I find it tempting to say that the subjective experience is not personal. It seems incommunicable, but what I mean is that there is no aspect of myself in it: that's all over in the computation (incidentally I am reminded of one of the objections to "Cogito, ergo sum"[4].)
At this point, the idea of "Atman"[5] is starting to look pretty good (thank you those who found the Adviata link, I would not have.) However, besides Prof. Grim's touch on the topic I know nothing about it (haw). My impression of Atman is that it is ineffable, primitive and pervasive. It does not have a location because it is not a thing: it is an aspect of reality.
And now we arrive at panpsychism, or at least what I thought panpsychism is. Subjective experience, but not the computational content that gives rise to the more visible parts of consciousness, is a fundamental aspect of reality. Rocks have subjective experience. Rocks are not conscious, unless they include physical processes we choose to recognize as consciousness. A rock's subjective experience is a lot like your subjective experience of the IR spectrum, assuming that you are like me and have no qualia affected by it.
The problem of consciousness (or the quality of something being able to experience itself and things around it), may never be solved. Even if the reductionist approach reveals some fundamental field or particle that gives rise to consciousness (which is very unlikely), it just shifts the problem from the brain's neural network and into that phenomenon.
An old Julian Jaynes analogy comes to mind: if you're a flashlight, you will never be able to understand light, because wherever you look, light will be there. By definition you're unable to look at something that is dark. You perceive the world as being bathed in perpetual light.
The closest we might get may be a hand-wavy form of panpsychism, with some probable connection to quantum fluctuations.
Good point. I can't prove it, I am assuming you have it given I have it.
I agree consciousness is an emergent property of matter, although I didn't always think that way. Panpsychism appears attractive at first glance (it makes it fundamental, and that is after all our lived experience). But that only seems to move the problem of what it actually is somewhere else, to some mysterious "mind stuff".
Indeed. If we accept panpsychism, then the "hard problem" of consciousness morphs into the hard problem of how awareness arises, and what degree of awareness and understanding is present in a given individual.
I don’t think it necessitates pansychism. You can still think of consciousness as a by product of a specific configuration, or just sufficient quantity of neurons or whatever.
However it emerges remains a mystery, but it’s possible that some configuration of them does not produce the consciousness affect.
For example, a million neurons is not enough to turn the lights on, but X amount is.
> What definitionally makes consciousness prohibited by the physical world?
"consciousness" is too broad a term—I only mean to refer to the aspect of it dealt with in "the hard problem".
The hard problem deals with the existence of subjectivity itself. All other aspects of consciousness, e.g. "self-awareness" can at least in principle by thought of as producible by some type of system architecture (in the case of self-awareness, the system needs at least two layers, the upper one operating on data which represents the state of the lower one—i.e. it operates on a model of self; a vast simplification, but maybe it clarifies a bit).
But when you try to do the same thing with the existence of subjectivity itself, it doesn't really make sense. It isn't any kind of "system," it's not even a behavior, not something with any kind of state evolving over time, not reducible to separate parts, etc.
The "by definition" part is most clear if you think of subjectivity as "the field of qualia present at any moment"—a concept also sometimes referred to as "immediate experience". Thinking of subjectivity in terms of a qualia field which is "immediately present" to consciousness (i.e. there is no mediation; it is in fact the only thing we're immediately in contact with as conscious subjects), it's easier to see specifically why it has the characteristics listed above which make it not producible by any kind of "system," and all the things we can do by re-arranging physical materials, e.g. molecules, can be described through the concept of a system (something with parts and relations between them and some kind of consistency in behavior).
The problem with panpsychism is not that it is unnecessary or not anthropocentric, but that it is provably false. If everything was conscious then full anesthetic (removal of consciousness with neurotoxic chemicals) wouldn't work.
It does work though, which makes it clear that consciousness is a property produced by a mechanism in the brain.
I just don't see why consciousness would require any sort of special physics. We live in a world full of emergent phenomena, and consciousness seems like it should just be another one of them.
Have you ever had a moment when your program was more complex than you could grasp? Consciousness is just too complex to grasp, not transcendent. It's physical like everything else.
Do you believe consciousness doesn't fall under the laws of physics or are you saying the laws of physics as currently known don't yet go far enough to explain the working of consciousness? You probably know Roger Penrose and Douglas Hofstadter have been going round and round on this issue, in a good-natured manner, for decades now. Penrose is convinced QM is required to explain consciousness, whereas Hofstadter maintains consciousness can be modeled with mathematics. It really boils down to can you create an AI that's conscious (which Hofstadter believes) or do you need a physical structure like the brain (which Penrose believes). Neither one is arguing though that consciousness isn't subject to the laws of physics, one just believes the laws of physics as currently known are insufficient to explain consciousness. That appears to be the camp you're in?
I agree that it doesn't have to be in any way mystical and that it comes to redefining what's fundamental and what's merely constructed or emergent (although it's a very tricky term). In the panpsychist approach neither matter nor consciousness can be reduced to the other one.
For more engineering approach to the problem, there's lot we can do. One way would be to study in more and more details the correlates of consciousness to understand the "linking" mechanism better. Anil Seth describes this approach here: https://aeon.co/essays/the-hard-problem-of-consciousness-is-....
On the other hand, if consciousness indeed is a fundamental attribute of reality, we should extend the 'engineering' to cover also the 'mind' part of reality. This is exactly what meditation is - to train the mind so that it can see more and more clearly all the components of conscious experience until it reaches the bottom. As a result you come up with a number of 'edge cases' - interesting states that can be used to reason about this reality conceptually.
There are eg. 'experience of space itself', experience of consciousness (so called immaterial Jhanas) or finally experience caused by calming the unconscious mind to the extent that it stops projecting any content into conscious mind, while the latter is still operating. This (supposedly) leads to realisation by the mind itself that the 'experienced world' is nothing but its creation. Of course we all can understand it conceptually, but this experience leads to permanent change in perception (you can't "unsee it") which becomes as objective as the human mind can possibly be. Meaning, that it realises in every moment that each experience is its own creation.
It may all seem mystical, exotic or plain crazy, but there's no other way to understand the mind than through the mind itself, if the discussed hypothesis is true.
Maybe every brick has consciousness, what matters to humans is whether it's a consciousness that we can communicate with. We don't care about consciousnesses with orthogonal arrows of time, or consciousnesses with nothing to say or no way to say it in our universe. We're after a compatible kind of consciousness.
It seems to me that the requirement that consciousness itself be a physical phenomenon is too strong. It's just that in order for us to notice, it must have physical I/O.
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