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Comment by SmirthsDAC | Hacker News Reader

>Now, if you want a particle to be conscious, your minimum expectation should be that the particle can change.

The crux of the argument seems to be here, and is simply a fallacious equivalency of free will/agency and consciousness. Two different philosophical issues that may have a unifying explanation, but not for now.

Besides, panpsychism seems to almost be tautological in its assertions: if we accept materialism, and we accept consciousness exists in some creatures, then where else would consciousness be "realized" in aggregate except distributed amongst the actual matter of the brain, down reductivly to sub-atomic particles? That doesn't mean it's a fully formalized robust theory, but the concepts underlying it are sound.

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No, that’s crazy. It takes lots of atoms of iron and silicon to make a Boeing 747, but that doesn’t mean that a single iron atom has even the slightest amount of “plane-ness”.

Requiring that it has "plane-ness" seems like an unpackable ambiguous criteria. I am speaking on a simple functional level.

Rather, a given iron atom is one of the atoms that make up a given 747, so it absolutely is (and here's where the tautology comes in) part of the distributed material that makes up the plane. Without such atoms there would be no plane. The same is being said here except with consciousness, no more.

Requiring that it has "plane-ness" seems like an unpackable ambiguous criteria.

So consciousness is more unpackable and less ambiguous?

Demanding "plane-ness" is the mistake here: you're throwing in a kind of glib idealism. If instead you demand "the possibility of forming lots and lots of electron bonds in a shape capable of performing flight" then the iron atoms did "have an amount" of the property necessary for being a plane.

I suppose if you define "conscious" in that way-- "this atom/electron/whatever has the possibility to be part of a system that thinks/reasons/feels/perceives"-- then yeah, panpsychism is vacuously true. But that's a wild abuse of the word "conscious" that is nothing like the its understood meaning: if nothing is not conscious, then the word is meaningless. When we try to define consciousness, we're obviously looking for the "thing" which we have but rocks and water molecules plainly don't. If you don't want "consciousnesses" to be the word for that thing, fine, but serious people are just going to ignore you, invent a new word for the thing, and carry on the original search.

And when I talk to panpsychists, I get the distinct sense that they know this and they're learning on it, and by doing so they're motte-and-baileying everyone else. They start out by saying that "electrons have consciousness", with the unspoken implication that consciousness means the popularly-understood ability to reason and plan and have subjective experience, even if they won't say so. And then when someone scientifically-minded comes along and points out that that's absurd, they retreat to a new definition of consciousness that is true but pointless. We're trying to really solve the hard problem here, not handwave it away and declare victory.

Maybe I'm not a serious person, but I don't think "consciousness means the popularly-understood ability to reason and plan" is part of the common understanding of this term, and a lot of what you wrote seems like a "no true Scottsman" to me. And actually, really defining well what is meant by "consciousness" seems to be a big part of the challenge.

> We're trying to really solve the hard problem here

This seems to me to be the crux of the misunderstanding. To me, panpsychism essentially presents a perspective that it may not be a well-defined problem in the first place. Like a dog chasing its own tail. Or if you prefer, it's like the question: "why is there something rather than nothing?" who knows if there is an answer to this? I don't want to go into this too much, but to me panpsychism is basically an intuition for why the "problem of consciousness" may belong to this set of fundamental questions that we may not be able to find an answer for, and if that could conceivably be the case, then it is valuable for providing that intuition because that may be the best we can do.

Obligatory links to Anomalous Monism https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/anomalous-monism/ and supervenience https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/supervenience/

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