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?
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?