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Comment by karmakaze | Hacker News Reader

I'm trying to be open-minded and make sense of the position.

The first big leap is considering experience to be a continuum from humans down to inorganic matter. This is stretching the meaning of 'experience'. If I walk on snow, does it experience deformation, or does it just deform?

The second leap is saying science only tells us what matter does and not "the intrinsic nature of matter: what matter is, in and of itself." I can't see how this gets you anywhere, you can say it's anything and it's self-satisfying.

The Hollywood ending really lost me. Let's just sweep this consciousness problem into a tiny tiny place and call it intrinsic: "So it turns out that there is a huge hole in our scientific story. The proposal of the panpsychist is to put consciousness in that hole. Consciousness, for the panpsychist, is the intrinsic nature of matter."

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> The first big leap is considering experience to be a continuum from humans down to inorganic matter. This is stretching the meaning of 'experience'. If I walk on snow, does it experience deformation, or does it just deform?

This is the part where materialism has the burden of proof to explain a mechanism for how, suddenly, snow doesn't experience de-formation.

You get it. You've made the logical link of connections from human down to snow, and you see no mechanism for a sudden loss of the ability to experience.

The rational answer is to say that provided what we know about the universe right now, it seems that there is nothing that does not have the property of experience.

The only other rational answer is solipsism because there's no real evidence that anything other than your self has any experience, but that's no fun and doesn't have any interesting conclusions.

Most people's interpretation of Occam's Razor would probably disagree with you.

But more importantly- the distinction you are making does not explain anything. Regardless of whether inorganic matter has experiences, there aren't any observable phenomena that have outcomes that are effected. You can make a claim one way or the other, and the world behaves the same regardless. I tend to fall toward the stance of logical positivism on this one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism

I don't get this. I have an experience because I have specialized organs for delivering _information_ to a central information processing unit which can evaluate the experience in a way that is _temporally decoupled_ from the event itself. There is no such mechanism in snow, it doesn't convert "deformation" into data separately from the physical fact of its deformation.

What you have are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and a few other pieces of earth, water, and air that are dancing around each other in a very complex way in order to dance up a very complex experience that has interesting properties that the snow does not exhibit in its experience of simple deformation.

Your very special organs are nothing but melted snow(water) deforming against broken up rock(carbon), repeatedly, in beautiful fractal patterns that have emerged through evolutionary processes over billions of years.

These evolutionary processes that turned Snow into You.

The _information_ is higher order deformation.

So redefine experience = process? That's all I can parse out of it.

Cool, that's a start. Another implication is that you're a lot older and you've experienced a lot more than you identify with at the moment in the span of time identifying as this human system.

I won't give you more than you can chew. Accepting that process=experience is already a huge paradigm shift.

If you're interested in deeper implications, it's better if you come to them without anyone handing them over.

> If I walk on snow, does it experience deformation, or does it just deform?

For me, some of the "making sense" about a position like this is in terms of such dichotomies. The important part is that this description applies equally to all members of the continuum, e.g., "if 'I' like a song, am 'I' experiencing happiness or is 'my' electrochemical clump of 'me' just reacting?"

Both. Your electrochemical clump of you just reacting causes you to experience happiness.

They certainly don't have a lot of programming experience. I can see them developing something with a bunch of complexity, experiencing a bug, being unable to identify what's causing it (partially due to not having good tools), then declaring it a "intrinsic part of the program"... or "feature". Maybe not that far off after all...

The article finally lost me with "The only way we can find out about the consciousness of others is by asking them [..]". So just add the appropriate response to a sufficiently capable chat-bot and we are done? And if more is required than just a simple yes/no, the same checklist can be used to build something artificial. But since consciousness is one of the good old "you know it when you see it", we will likely shift the goal post pretty hard as AI development progresses, and mostly use the term to exclude what we achieved so far. Kind of like we stop calling something AI once we achieved the a task and use a more technical term... e.g. the many CNN's in a Tesla. Hope I get to experience much of that in my lifetime.

If you'd like to hear someone who disagrees with Goff discussing the idea, I'd highly recommend his podcast with Sean Carroll:

https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2019/11/04/71-p...

A somewhat similar discussion is here:

https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2020/01/06/78-d...

> The first big leap is considering experience to be a continuum from humans down to inorganic matter.

Why is that a leap, while considering it to be discontinuous is not?

If I walk on snow, do I experience walking, or do I just walk? What is experience?

If we explain experience in a way that its reactions happening in my body, maybe biochemical reactions, that could even translate into thoughts in my head, I could say that in a lower level the snow also experience reactions, physical reactions. A snowflake don't have a body to experience like we do, but it does experience something, because if not, it would not even deform.

I tried following that line of reasoning. I couldn't imagine any reactions in the snow that would give rise to experience in any meaningful way distinct from merely deforming.

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