Hacker News Reader

Comment by ericmay | Hacker News Reader

Panpsychism to the rescue! :p

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism

Panpsychism is a dirty word these days, and lacks formality. Fundamentally the loose idea is sound, and is encapsulated in Integrated Information Theory ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory) for the most part.

Panpsychism is really something that makes sense to me. It's a really parsimonious way of solving the hard problem of consciousness without getting into dualism or assuming anything special about matter that makes up sentient beings. I really don't think that testing this could ever be in the realm of physics, though.

I certainly find it a compelling theory, and I agree that it’s probably not testable. I lean toward consciousness being an illusion or simply non-existent. It kind of seems like we, by nature, reject this notion because it shatters our collective human psyche, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

On the other hand we have a hard time even defining consciousness.

Consciousness is probably the only thing that _cannot_ be an illusion. Whatever you may think, the fact that you are having an experience is the only thing you can know for sure (all the content of your experience could be planted into your mind, but you at least know that you are experiencing it). You really can't know if anyone else really exists and is having an experience, or if its all a dream filled with impersonators created by your own mind, but you know first hand that at least one experience is happening (your conscious experience).

Perhaps "the self", or "the idea that I am a being with a consciousness separate from all the universe" is an illusion.

> Whatever you may think, the fact that you are having an experience is the only thing you can know for sure

It seems to me that you’re defining consciousness as having thought (please correct me if I’m wrong). I’m ok with that, but I think at a minimum you’d have to agree that any creature is capable of having thought and therefore possessing of consciousness. If not, let’s say you’d argue that an ant is just reacting to chemical signals, I’d just say the same is true of humans.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com