Panpsychism is the idea that everything is conscious to some degree (which, to be clear, isn’t what I think). In the past, the common response to the idea was, “So, rocks are conscious?” This argument was meant to illustrate the absurdity of panpsychism.
Now, we have made rocks represent pins and switches, enabling us to use them as computers. We made them complex enough that we developed neural networks and created large language models–the most complex of which have nodes that represent space, time, and the abstraction of truth, according to some papers. So many people are convinced these things are conscious, which has many suggesting that everything may be conscious to some degree.
In other words, the possibility of rocks being conscious is now commonly used to argue in favor of panpsychism, when previously it was used to argue against it.
if youre going to break it down to constituent pieces, then there is no difference between you and the complex rock.
In the past, the common response to the idea was, “So, rocks are conscious?” This argument was meant to illustrate the absurdity of panpsychism.
To me, this response does not illustrate any absurdity in panpsychism.
Not everyone finds it persuasive, yeah. It’s an appeal to intuition that many people, though not all, have.
Quantum mechanics is unintuitive. Appealing to intuition is not an argument, it’s avoiding bothering with an argument.
I think the whole issue is stuck on our inability to define consciousness. I think that it lies on a spectrum like everything else that has to do with the mind, so we need to maybe operationalize it somehow. Maybe make up a units of consciousness for variables on the spectrum: perception, working memory, planning, execution, etc. Would it be nodes like respective neurons?
I think it’s interesting that we all know what we’re referring to when we communicate about consciousness, but we can’t define it. It’s one of those fundamental concepts like energy in physics or pleasure in psychology. Like, define energy: energy is something. Define pleasure: it feels good? Is consciousness the thing experiencing things? Or is consciousness the experience itself, and our human brains aren’t capable of defining it because we’re stuck with limited dimensions, like trying to imagine a 4th spatial dimension? Is there a higher level of consciousness that emerges from our collective individual consciousnesses? HELP 🤯
The word consciousness confuses everybody. Just ask yourself what the rock is aware of. The more aware something is, like better eyes or a better brain, the more conscious it is. That’s why when you sleep you are less conscious than when you are awake but still more conscious than a rock.
