I’m not sure that my intent is for panpsychism to be doing explanatory lifting
Well ..it kind of should be, because otherwise you are asserting something without it being motivated by empirical evidence or having explanatory power.
as the non-panpsychist accounts people were promoting on Twitter
Most of your Twitter references seem to be to people who claim that qualia “are” mathematical structures , such as Michael Johnson. I don’t think that’s particularly plausible. If it were the case, there would no Mary’s Room problem, and I find Mary’s Room plausible. Qualia spaces are kind of a thing, but I don’t think they get to the heart of the problem, because Qualia are intrinsic. Qualia-are-maths would forced on you to by an everything-is-maths ontology , by … wait for it … I’m not too convinced by those arguments either.
my panpsychist account is illustrating what a less opinionated alternative might look like
But as far as I can see “consciousness is EM fields” is doing the lifting.
I will reassert my original statement which is that people who were not panpsychists were drawing arbitrary/opinionated boundaries between what is conscious and not conscious and I wanted to demonstrate what outcomes could be reached if we totally sidestepped that. The post itself draws on panpsychism as a maximally-inclusive/inflationary framework for consciousness which permits us to handle the full space of possibilities/uncertainty around whether or not a given structure is conscious appropriately. For this reason I very deliberately only devoted one sentence to panpsychism in the opening paragraph:
Personally, I consider myself a physicalist, but I’m also a panpsychist – because physics doesn’t really seem to deal in hard absolutes, and I find it straightforward to consider that everything is conscious to some greater or lesser degree – so I’m loath to accept any claims which propose that any specific system isn’t conscious.
This post is not specifically an argument for panpsychism except perhaps as a demonstration that panpsychist ways of thinking can be internally consistent. If this post was specifically an argument for panpsychism I would have spilt a lot more ink. My true stance is that I lean panpsychist modulo the amount of uncertainty described in the post. If an empirical program for study of consciousness (some combination of neurostimulation, neuroimaging, and direct reports) demonstrates that consciousness is associated with, as an example, the electromagnetic field, and that the psychophysical laws/translation function which most parsimoniously explain the human experiences being studies also predict significant experiences everywhere else in the cosmos, I would consider that an argument for a stereotypically strong panpsychism in which rocks are conscious. My expectation is we wind up with something less inclusive than that in which the “consciousness amplitude” (for want of a better term) is low but nonzero throughout most of the cosmos.
Most of your Twitter references seem to be to people who claim that qualia “are” mathematical structures, such as Michael Johnson.
Mike does not claim that qualia “are” mathematical structures. Mike subscribed to what he calls qualia formalism – for any given conscious experience, there exists – in principle – a mathematical object isomorphic to its phenomenology. This basically just claims that qualia are lawful and modelling them mathematically is tractable.
And finally, dual-aspect monism is compatible with panpsychism.
I will reassert my original statement which is that people who were not panpsychists were drawing arbitrary/opinionated boundaries between what is conscious and not conscious and I wanted to demonstrate what outcomes could be reached if we totally sidestepped that
Arbitrary boundaries are bad, because they are arbitrary. Boundaries are not bsad. The problem of consciousness is difficult because there are a number of conflicting intuitions: one of them is that not many entities are conscious, which panpsychism disregards.
Whether panpsychism+EM field theory disregards it is another question.
The post itself draws on panpsychism as a maximally-inclusive/inflationary framework for consciousness which permits us to handle the full space of possibilities/uncertainty around whether or not a given structure is conscious appropriately.
The idea that nothing is conscious by default also allows you to do that. It’s just that whatever property or structure is held up as enabling consciousness has to to actuallyexplain why.
. If an empirical program for study of consciousness
I don’t see how you could have a programme for studying HP consciousness , since we don’t have qualiomters.
(some combination of neurostimulation, neuroimaging, and direct reports) demonstrates that consciousness is associated with, as an example, the electromagnetic field, and that the psychophysical laws/translation function which most parsimoniously explain the human experiences being studies also predict significant experiences everywhere else in the cosmos, I would consider that an argument for a stereotypically strong panpsychism in which rocks are conscious.
But that’s not panpsychism as usually defined—the usual definition is that everything actually is conscious.
Mike subscribed to what he calls qualia formalism – for any given conscious experience, there exists – in principle – a mathematical object isomorphic to its phenomenology.
That can’t be true of an elementary experience , like the famous coloured patch. It can be true of the relationships between possible experiences, but that leads to the original problem I pointed out.
The difference between maths and non-maths is, in fact, mathematical. “That field over there? If you look at its structure, it does not use a hard logic where facts follow from axioms and tautologies. In fact, if you want to rigorously determine how strictly it adheres to that kind of structure… let me pull out my notepad and figure out how that should be defined.”
Well ..it kind of should be, because otherwise you are asserting something without it being motivated by empirical evidence or having explanatory power.
Most of your Twitter references seem to be to people who claim that qualia “are” mathematical structures , such as Michael Johnson. I don’t think that’s particularly plausible. If it were the case, there would no Mary’s Room problem, and I find Mary’s Room plausible. Qualia spaces are kind of a thing, but I don’t think they get to the heart of the problem, because Qualia are intrinsic. Qualia-are-maths would forced on you to by an everything-is-maths ontology , by … wait for it … I’m not too convinced by those arguments either.
But as far as I can see “consciousness is EM fields” is doing the lifting.
So are you holding that instead of panpsychism?
@James Camacho
It’s not the the case that all differentiate mathematical differences -- the difference between maths and non-maths is not mathematical.
I will reassert my original statement which is that people who were not panpsychists were drawing arbitrary/opinionated boundaries between what is conscious and not conscious and I wanted to demonstrate what outcomes could be reached if we totally sidestepped that. The post itself draws on panpsychism as a maximally-inclusive/inflationary framework for consciousness which permits us to handle the full space of possibilities/uncertainty around whether or not a given structure is conscious appropriately. For this reason I very deliberately only devoted one sentence to panpsychism in the opening paragraph:
This post is not specifically an argument for panpsychism except perhaps as a demonstration that panpsychist ways of thinking can be internally consistent. If this post was specifically an argument for panpsychism I would have spilt a lot more ink. My true stance is that I lean panpsychist modulo the amount of uncertainty described in the post. If an empirical program for study of consciousness (some combination of neurostimulation, neuroimaging, and direct reports) demonstrates that consciousness is associated with, as an example, the electromagnetic field, and that the psychophysical laws/translation function which most parsimoniously explain the human experiences being studies also predict significant experiences everywhere else in the cosmos, I would consider that an argument for a stereotypically strong panpsychism in which rocks are conscious. My expectation is we wind up with something less inclusive than that in which the “consciousness amplitude” (for want of a better term) is low but nonzero throughout most of the cosmos.
Mike does not claim that qualia “are” mathematical structures. Mike subscribed to what he calls qualia formalism – for any given conscious experience, there exists – in principle – a mathematical object isomorphic to its phenomenology. This basically just claims that qualia are lawful and modelling them mathematically is tractable.
And finally, dual-aspect monism is compatible with panpsychism.
Arbitrary boundaries are bad, because they are arbitrary. Boundaries are not bsad. The problem of consciousness is difficult because there are a number of conflicting intuitions: one of them is that not many entities are conscious, which panpsychism disregards.
Whether panpsychism+EM field theory disregards it is another question.
The idea that nothing is conscious by default also allows you to do that. It’s just that whatever property or structure is held up as enabling consciousness has to to actuallyexplain why.
I don’t see how you could have a programme for studying HP consciousness , since we don’t have qualiomters.
But that’s not panpsychism as usually defined—the usual definition is that everything actually is conscious.
That can’t be true of an elementary experience , like the famous coloured patch. It can be true of the relationships between possible experiences, but that leads to the original problem I pointed out.
The difference between maths and non-maths is, in fact, mathematical. “That field over there? If you look at its structure, it does not use a hard logic where facts follow from axioms and tautologies. In fact, if you want to rigorously determine how strictly it adheres to that kind of structure… let me pull out my notepad and figure out how that should be defined.”