Do you have an operational definition of what properties you think makes you “panpsychist” rather than “non-psychist”? I can certainly see the appeal (though I haven’t done it for myself, and may not while I’m living) of denying the quale of introspecting one’s own experiences. But that leads to (AFAICT) some form of deep agnosticism about what that even is and whether it’s important.
I have no path from my current beliefs to any sort of thinking that every possible subset of spacetime (every 4D enclosed space) has some important property or behavior that is similar to what I experience as consciousness.
I don’t think a rejection of duality leads inevitably to panpsychism. I can have a strong intuition that consciousness, as I experience it, is probably a function of complexity and specific configurations of storage and processing, which humans have much more (perhaps many orders of magnitude) more than other animals, and is near-zero in vegetables, and even closer to absolute zero in rocks or in interstellar empty space. I literally don’t know how other humans experience it, but I see enough structural similarity that I choose to believe them when they make tongue-flapping sound-pressure waves that encode their communications about it. As an entity gets further in structure or interaction style, I am less sure.
I guess, to follow in your public declaration path: I’m a consciousness-agnostic. I admit the possibility that everything has qualia, and I admit the possibility that I am fully alone in the universe and the rest of y’all are p-zombies (or don’t exist at all, in the case of me being a Boltzmann brain). I do think, by fairly naive statistical reasoning, that it’s most likely that things are as they seem, and most humans are rather similar to me (though varying somewhat) in their cognitive/emotional/experiential processing. I think it’s possible that other large-brained mammals are comparable, but likely much lower. I think it’s unlikely that smaller-brained Chordates are even on the scale, let alone other phyla or kingdoms. It’s almost certainly possible that “artificial” mind-like structures could exist that I believe are conscious, but they’re nowhere in sight (not close, not immediately predictable) yet.
Do you have an operational definition of what properties you think makes you “panpsychist” rather than “non-psychist”?
Hmm, well. Maybe this is what you’re looking for: (I’m opposed to calling it nonpsychism because it doesn’t actually refute experience, but) I do not believe that one can perceive one’s own experiential measure. One can make reports about what one’s experience would consist of, but one can’t actually report how much experience (if any) there is. There is no way to measure that thing for the same reason there’s no way to know the fundamental substrate of reality, because in fact it’s the same question, it’s the question of which patterns directly exist (aren’t just interpretations being projected onto reality as models).
One very concrete operationalization of my UD-Panpsychism is that I think the anthropic prior just is the universal distribution. If you put me in a mirror chamber situation I would literally just compute my P(I am brain A rather than brain B) by taking the inverse K of translators from possible underlying encodings of physics to my experiential stream (idk if anyone’s talked about that method before but I’m getting an intuitive sense that if you’re conditioning on a particular type of physics then that’s a way of getting measure that’s slightly closer to feasible than just directly solomonoffing over all possible observation streams)
I use it not because I think the UDP measure is ‘correct’, but because it is minimal, and on inspection it turns out there’s no justification for adding any additional assumptions about how experience works, it’s just a formal definition of a humble prior.
I can have a strong intuition that consciousness, as I experience it, is probably a function of complexity and specific configurations of storage and processing, which humans have much more
It’s kinda wonderful to hear you articulate that. I used to have this intuition and I just don’t at all right now. I see it as a symptom of this begged belief that humans have been perceiving that they have higher experiential measure than other things do, lots of humans think they’re directly observing that, but that is a thing that by its nature cannot be seen, and isn’t being seen, and once you internalise that you no longer need to look for explanations of why the human brain might be especially predisposed to generate or catch experiencingness more than other systems, because there’s just no reason to think it is.
Do you have an operational definition of what properties you think makes you “panpsychist” rather than “non-psychist”? I can certainly see the appeal (though I haven’t done it for myself, and may not while I’m living) of denying the quale of introspecting one’s own experiences. But that leads to (AFAICT) some form of deep agnosticism about what that even is and whether it’s important.
I have no path from my current beliefs to any sort of thinking that every possible subset of spacetime (every 4D enclosed space) has some important property or behavior that is similar to what I experience as consciousness.
I don’t think a rejection of duality leads inevitably to panpsychism. I can have a strong intuition that consciousness, as I experience it, is probably a function of complexity and specific configurations of storage and processing, which humans have much more (perhaps many orders of magnitude) more than other animals, and is near-zero in vegetables, and even closer to absolute zero in rocks or in interstellar empty space. I literally don’t know how other humans experience it, but I see enough structural similarity that I choose to believe them when they make tongue-flapping sound-pressure waves that encode their communications about it. As an entity gets further in structure or interaction style, I am less sure.
I guess, to follow in your public declaration path: I’m a consciousness-agnostic. I admit the possibility that everything has qualia, and I admit the possibility that I am fully alone in the universe and the rest of y’all are p-zombies (or don’t exist at all, in the case of me being a Boltzmann brain). I do think, by fairly naive statistical reasoning, that it’s most likely that things are as they seem, and most humans are rather similar to me (though varying somewhat) in their cognitive/emotional/experiential processing. I think it’s possible that other large-brained mammals are comparable, but likely much lower. I think it’s unlikely that smaller-brained Chordates are even on the scale, let alone other phyla or kingdoms. It’s almost certainly possible that “artificial” mind-like structures could exist that I believe are conscious, but they’re nowhere in sight (not close, not immediately predictable) yet.
Hmm, well. Maybe this is what you’re looking for: (I’m opposed to calling it nonpsychism because it doesn’t actually refute experience, but) I do not believe that one can perceive one’s own experiential measure.
One can make reports about what one’s experience would consist of, but one can’t actually report how much experience (if any) there is. There is no way to measure that thing for the same reason there’s no way to know the fundamental substrate of reality, because in fact it’s the same question, it’s the question of which patterns directly exist (aren’t just interpretations being projected onto reality as models).
One very concrete operationalization of my UD-Panpsychism is that I think the anthropic prior just is the universal distribution. If you put me in a mirror chamber situation I would literally just compute my P(I am brain A rather than brain B) by taking the inverse K of translators from possible underlying encodings of physics to my experiential stream (idk if anyone’s talked about that method before but I’m getting an intuitive sense that if you’re conditioning on a particular type of physics then that’s a way of getting measure that’s slightly closer to feasible than just directly solomonoffing over all possible observation streams)
I use it not because I think the UDP measure is ‘correct’, but because it is minimal, and on inspection it turns out there’s no justification for adding any additional assumptions about how experience works, it’s just a formal definition of a humble prior.
It’s kinda wonderful to hear you articulate that. I used to have this intuition and I just don’t at all right now. I see it as a symptom of this begged belief that humans have been perceiving that they have higher experiential measure than other things do, lots of humans think they’re directly observing that, but that is a thing that by its nature cannot be seen, and isn’t being seen, and once you internalise that you no longer need to look for explanations of why the human brain might be especially predisposed to generate or catch experiencingness more than other systems, because there’s just no reason to think it is.