I’ll just publicly declare that I’m a panpsychist. I feel that panpsychism doesn’t really need to be explicitly argued for. As soon as it’s placed on the table you’ll have to start interrogating your reasons for not being one, for thinking that experiential measure/the indexical prior is intrinsically connected to humanlikeness in some way, and you’ll realise there were never really good reasons, it was all sharpshooter fallacy, streetlamp fallacy, the conflation of experience with humanlike language-memory-agency sustained under that torturous word “consciousness”, and you’ll realise that this dualist distinction between existence and experience isn’t doing any work, and one day you’ll wake up and find that instead of maintaining those two measures, you only use one.
And it’s an irresistable position in the aesthetic realm as well, if forced there a panpsychist can start wearing jazzy colors, partying with animists, re-enchanting nature, and accusing their opponents of “anthropocentrism”.
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.
How do electrons having the property “conscious”, but otherwise continuing to obey Maxwell’s equations translate into me saying “I am conscious”?
Or more generally, how does any lump of matter, having the property “conscious” but otherwise continuing to obey unchanged physical laws, end up uttering the words “I am conscious”?
the property electrons have that you observe within yourself and want to call “conscious”-as-in-hard-problem-why-is-there-any-perspective is, imo, simply “exists”. existence is perspective-bearing. in other words, in my view, the hard problem is just the localitypilled version of “why is there something rather than nothing?”
The so-called easy problem is where all the interesting stuff lies and where the answer to your question would be found. why, assuming that any energy or possibly even location in the universe has local perspective, do brains in particular seem to have a lot of it? and that gets into big questions about what it means for one patch of matter to be aware of another. It’s a big question and the insight of panpsychism is to get to the point where you get to treat your question as an empirical one, where instead of “special property of existing-as-in-being-conscious” you separate existing from being conscious.
also, I don’t think either of these questions exactly describe moral worth. I’m pretty sure some things (most of which are chemical reactions, a few of which are plain old kinetic) that can happen to my bodymind are unwanted pain when they occur to some atoms, and pleasing activation when they occur to other atoms, and you have to consider multiple atoms to distinguish the two. as a system, my preferences favor some configurations over others in a way that isn’t distinguishable at the atomic scale. …I suspect. not at all sure there won’t turn out to be some reliable thermodynamic signature of pain at the atomic level, but it would be pretty weird.
the property electrons have that you observe within yourself and want to call “conscious”-as-in-hard-problem-why-is-there-any-perspective is, imo, simply “exists”. existence is perspective-bearing. in other words, in my view, the hard problem is just the localitypilled version of “why is there something rather than nothing?”
This actually leads into why I feel drawn to Tegmark’s mathematical universe. It seems that regardless of whether or not my electrons are tagged with the “exists” xml tag, I would have no way of knowing that fact, and would think the same thoughts regardless, so I’m skeptical this word doesn’t get dissolved as we know more philosophy, so that we end up saying stuff like “yeah actually everything exists” or “well no, nothing exists”, and then derive our UDASSA without reference to “existence” as a primitive.
why [...] do brains in particular seem to have a lot of it?
We don’t actually have much (or any) evidence that they do. That is not the kind of thing that can be observed. (this is the main bitter bullet that has to be bitten to resolve the paradox)
I think magnitude of pleasure and pain in a system is going to be defined as experiential measure of the substrate times some basically arbitrary behaviourist criterion which depends on what uplifted humans want to empathise with or not, which might be weirdly expansive or complicated and narrow depending on how the uplifting goes.
the key word, the whole question, the only reason anyone is asking, is “seem to”. that’s where our inquiry flows from. and I think it gets resolved by something about structures representing other structures. neuroscience stuff, mental representation, etc. the “easy problem” ends up being mostly about “so, what lead to this structure forming those references and keeping them up to date?” which is an empirical question about how stuff impacting nerves gets integrated in a way that matches the external structure, and the hard problem is just “why do any structures get the privilege of existing” + “why locality”
another way to put this is, why are these atoms aware of more than just the brute fact of existence?
Experiencingness doesn’t make them say that, it also isn’t the thing that’s making you say that. Everything that’s making you say you’re conscious is just about the behaviors of the material, while the magnitude of the experience, or the prior of being you, is somewhat orthogonal to the behaviour of the material.
You probably shouldn’t be asking me about “consciousness” when I already indicated that I don’t think it’s a coherent term and never used it myself.
I’ll just publicly declare that I’m a panpsychist. I feel that panpsychism doesn’t really need to be explicitly argued for. As soon as it’s placed on the table you’ll have to start interrogating your reasons for not being one, for thinking that experiential measure/the indexical prior is intrinsically connected to humanlikeness in some way, and you’ll realise there were never really good reasons, it was all sharpshooter fallacy, streetlamp fallacy, the conflation of experience with humanlike language-memory-agency sustained under that torturous word “consciousness”, and you’ll realise that this dualist distinction between existence and experience isn’t doing any work, and one day you’ll wake up and find that instead of maintaining those two measures, you only use one.
And it’s an irresistable position in the aesthetic realm as well, if forced there a panpsychist can start wearing jazzy colors, partying with animists, re-enchanting nature, and accusing their opponents of “anthropocentrism”.
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.
How do electrons having the property “conscious”, but otherwise continuing to obey Maxwell’s equations translate into me saying “I am conscious”?
Or more generally, how does any lump of matter, having the property “conscious” but otherwise continuing to obey unchanged physical laws, end up uttering the words “I am conscious”?
the property electrons have that you observe within yourself and want to call “conscious”-as-in-hard-problem-why-is-there-any-perspective is, imo, simply “exists”. existence is perspective-bearing. in other words, in my view, the hard problem is just the localitypilled version of “why is there something rather than nothing?”
The so-called easy problem is where all the interesting stuff lies and where the answer to your question would be found. why, assuming that any energy or possibly even location in the universe has local perspective, do brains in particular seem to have a lot of it? and that gets into big questions about what it means for one patch of matter to be aware of another. It’s a big question and the insight of panpsychism is to get to the point where you get to treat your question as an empirical one, where instead of “special property of existing-as-in-being-conscious” you separate existing from being conscious.
also, I don’t think either of these questions exactly describe moral worth. I’m pretty sure some things (most of which are chemical reactions, a few of which are plain old kinetic) that can happen to my bodymind are unwanted pain when they occur to some atoms, and pleasing activation when they occur to other atoms, and you have to consider multiple atoms to distinguish the two. as a system, my preferences favor some configurations over others in a way that isn’t distinguishable at the atomic scale. …I suspect. not at all sure there won’t turn out to be some reliable thermodynamic signature of pain at the atomic level, but it would be pretty weird.
This actually leads into why I feel drawn to Tegmark’s mathematical universe. It seems that regardless of whether or not my electrons are tagged with the “exists” xml tag, I would have no way of knowing that fact, and would think the same thoughts regardless, so I’m skeptical this word doesn’t get dissolved as we know more philosophy, so that we end up saying stuff like “yeah actually everything exists” or “well no, nothing exists”, and then derive our UDASSA without reference to “existence” as a primitive.
We don’t actually have much (or any) evidence that they do. That is not the kind of thing that can be observed. (this is the main bitter bullet that has to be bitten to resolve the paradox)
I think magnitude of pleasure and pain in a system is going to be defined as experiential measure of the substrate times some basically arbitrary behaviourist criterion which depends on what uplifted humans want to empathise with or not, which might be weirdly expansive or complicated and narrow depending on how the uplifting goes.
the key word, the whole question, the only reason anyone is asking, is “seem to”. that’s where our inquiry flows from. and I think it gets resolved by something about structures representing other structures. neuroscience stuff, mental representation, etc. the “easy problem” ends up being mostly about “so, what lead to this structure forming those references and keeping them up to date?” which is an empirical question about how stuff impacting nerves gets integrated in a way that matches the external structure, and the hard problem is just “why do any structures get the privilege of existing” + “why locality”
another way to put this is, why are these atoms aware of more than just the brute fact of existence?
Experiencingness doesn’t make them say that, it also isn’t the thing that’s making you say that. Everything that’s making you say you’re conscious is just about the behaviors of the material, while the magnitude of the experience, or the prior of being you, is somewhat orthogonal to the behaviour of the material.
You probably shouldn’t be asking me about “consciousness” when I already indicated that I don’t think it’s a coherent term and never used it myself.