Panpsychism & the Nature of Consciousness - Philip Goff

What is consciousness? Why does it even exist? It has long been treated as the byproduct of biological complexity. The more complicated the brain, the more self-aware. Other thinkers have seen consciousness as totally distinct from the body - dualism. But maybe consciousness, like space and time, mass and energy, is just a basic characteristic of the universe. Maybe it's a fundamental property of matter. Welcome to the concept of "panpsychism". It's a radical-sounding idea and it could prove vital for us in radically rethinking how we think about reality itself. It's been said that the only thing we know for certain is our own experience. But how do we account for this most subjective phenomenon within the science of consciousness? How can science with its objective metrics even begin to engage with the felt nature of the inner subjective life?
Philip Goff, professor of philosophy at Durham University, is a proponent of an emerging theory intended to shed light on the problem of consciousness - a theory called "panpsychism". In this program, he discusses these issues with Naheed Mustafa in an episode of the cbc podcast "Ideas". For more information: www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/panpsy...
#Philosophy #Consciousness

[@RayStraiter]

I'm much more open to alternatives to physical-ism since I became aware of the long hidden problems of Dark Matter and Dark Energy. And, I like the fact that ideas like these tend piss off the fundamentalists.

[@yifuxero5408]

The entire universe is Pure Consciousness "In-Itself" (The Ground of Being, or Shankara's Sat-Chit-Ananda). However, just thinking about it won't get you there. One must transcend thought and experience the state of Samadhi (Satori). There are many techniques for doing this going back over 2,000 years. One is the mantra method. Access "Mahamritunjaya mantra - Sacred Sounds Choir" and listen to it for 5 min per day for at least two weeks. If you haven't experience IT before, you will. And brains do NOT produce Pure Consciousness. The brain monitors the experience.

[@simonmasters3295]

Rather than "what it feels like to be something" as a definition, why not describe consciousness as "a means of communicating present experience to my future self" i.e. define its rationale or raisin d'etre. Consciousness can then easily be explained as evolutionarily adaptive.

[@simonmasters3295]

The Problem of Intrinsic Nature. Physical Science tells us about behaviour, not what it is like. Russel and Whitehead can't just project consciousness into "that space" (is that what I heard?) and say it explains anything.

[@simonmasters3295]

He: I have a PhD, I have thought about this. I became a panpsychic. Her: Another good question He: Confidently gives historical philosophical account saying little. What is matter has been answered once you reach chemistry.

[@philosophyofvalue8506]

Panpsychism is wrong because essential properties of consciousness like cognition, sentience and others I would like to list are not found in the physical world. I take panpsychism instead as an indication of the gross neglect and obfuscation of consciousness. For more, see my podcasts on youtube. Derek Mazzone

[@projectmalus]

Consciousness as a multiplicity of the One from the viewpoint of the multiplicity; enhanced awareness with the enhanced part trivial, since this is just filler in order to balance relations. The filler gained as adding points or objects of value with short curved motion segments, leading to the non-trivial part which is the expansion/contraction of understanding aka riding the one.

[@peregrintuk7085]

@@saimbhat6243 not entirely but he for sure has a problem with finding the most practical way to conceptualize things

[@dohduhdah]

It seems more plausible to account for the lack of scientific progress on the nature of consciousness because we lack the technology to study consciousness empirically (like brainscanners that reveal what goes on in the brain as we engage in mental activity at sufficient levels of detail). But if we just look at consciousness from a behavioral point of view, it has already been solved. We have computers that are conscious and this is revealed from the way they are able to learn to play games like go, starting from scratch (the rules of the game). They are able to master the skill of playing go way beyond human levels and clearly demonstrate they have a level of awareness what's going on in the game (like what's at stake and which decisions they should make in order to win the game). The fact that these AI neural networks lack the language skills to reflect on their consciousness is irrelevant. But you might wonder why there are no experiments that allow for a population of AI systems to evolve and develop language from scratch (combining genetic algorithms and neural networks), so the AI systems are not just able to learn from their own experience but also from the experience of their peers by having the ability to communicate. Human intelligence/consciousness is a matter of a huge population of individuals collectively accumulating knowledge over many generations. In that respect the comparison between the human brain and AI systems is rather silly, because there has not been a huge population of AI systems that has been given the opportunity to accumulate knowledge collectively over prolonged periods.

[@iMJBNi]

Claiming that computers are conscious based on their proficiency at finding optimal solutions to board states in games seems to me like missing the point of what is meant by consciousness in these types of contexts. "Consciousness" means here, for example, a "what's-it-likeness": I, as a conscious being, have experiences that are like something. Claiming that proficiency at exploiting rules is evidence of this kind of consciousness is odd. And claiming that human consciousness (the equation with intelligence is telling since they are not synonymous when consciousness is understood in the relevant sense) is the result of collective accumulation of knowledge also seems to point at the same misunderstanding: even if I were the sole human being on the planet with no connection to any cultural history, I would, presumably, be conscious in the sense that I would have some form of a sensory experience of the world. I would be the subject of my first-personal experience. Perhaps I couldn't use language and my thinking would be quite unintelligent. But I would still be conscious.

[@dohduhdah]

​Just because you happen to experience something and it feels like something doesn't mean you're conscious of what's happening. You might be experiencing something you never experienced before and you might be utterly clueless as to what is happening and I think that implies a lack of consciousness. People can also imagine all sorts of things. Maybe they think there are spirits that they can worship to positively influence their circumstances. From their perspective it might feel like they are doing something positive that helps improve their circumstances, but that doesn't imply these spirits actually exist and someone engaging in such worship to be aware of their existence. So people interpret their perceptions/experiences and act accordingly and if they misinterpret their perceptions, they can behave in irrational ways and that would constitute a subjective experience from their perspective, but I don't think that can be construed as a form of consciousness. Like an animal confronted with a mirror and seeing itself. Either it's conscious of the fact that it is observing itself in the mirror and it would maybe observe itself in a curious fashion because it's not something they experience frequently, but very different from an animal that is not aware of the fact it's observing itself in the mirror and feels threatened by its reflection and displays aggressive behavior towards the perceived threat.

[@iMJBNi]

@@dohduhdah "You might be experiencing something you never experienced before and you might be utterly clueless as to what is happening and I think that implies a lack of consciousness", "People can also imagine all sorts of things": You're talking about consciousness in a different sense than I and the people on the video are. You're talking about something like understanding which is completely different from consciousness as being capable of having experiences at all. All of my experiences could be utterly confused and I might misinterpret everything that is going on around me. Still, I would be experiencing something and it seems to me like it would be nonsensical to argue that I'm not "really" having a conscious experience. THIS meaning of consciousness relates to the hard problem of consciousness: why is it that there is such a thing as "what's-it-likeness" or first-personal experiential subjectivity at all? To emphasize this, the question isn't about whether our representations are accurate or not. It's about why our representations aren't going on "in the dark", without any conscious experience.

[@dohduhdah]

@@iMJBNi I think that's a rather convoluted notion of consciousness. If an animal who looks at a mirror image of itself and it mistakenly thinks it's looking an another individual, that animal is *not* conscious of looking at another individual, even though it interprets its observations as the experience of looking at another individual. Consciousness involves a mental framework for interpreting your experiences and having mental representations enabling you to reflect on your experiences. The 'what is it like' aspect is just the way experiences relate to the background of memories of past experiences. If you were to completely obliterate your memory (assuming this is possible somehow) and start recording new experiences, it wouldn't be like something to experience things, because there is nothing to relate it to.

[@iMJBNi]

@@dohduhdah Self-consciousness (which you're alluding to in your example about the mirror test) is different from consciousness as being capable of experience. At least on many accounts (and on first glance) my ability to perceive the color blue, for example, isn't dependent on me being able to attribute this experience to an "I". I would construe your example of an animal looking at its reflection and perceiving it as another individual as the animal having a conscious experience but failing to attribute the mirror image to itself, thus failing one test of self-consciousness. Regarding your example of obliterating memories, I'm afraid we're again talking past each other. I agree that being able to relate our present experiences to past experiences enriches our conscious experiences. However, even if I were to all of a sudden become a completely blank slate, I would still have an experience of something. I could maybe not make much sense of the sensory chaos, but I would still have an experience. So I probably couldn't give a rich account of what-it's-like but I'd argue that I definitely would still experience something that would in other circumstances be amenable to me giving an account of what I'm experiencing. That is what I'm talking about when I talk about consciousness. And I'm not alone: the so-called "phenomenal consciousness" is a central question for philosophy of mind and relevant when talking about panpsychism. The question is how and why there is are phenomenal consciousnesses at all.

[@francisletterford4999]

I smoke weed and listen to philosophy programs such as these

[@TheNoblot]

🍷🍷🍾🍾

[@fusiongautam1699]

I'm foingy it right now. You can also listen to J Krishnamurti

[@Karoltos]

Any recommendations?

[@TheNoblot]

😉 great however observe yourself