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RichardKennaway comments on My recent thoughts on consciousness - Less Wrong Discussion
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Does it answer such questions as "how does consciousness work?" and "how can we make one (by other than the traditional method)?"?
I don't believe it does, it suggests no particular theory of how to build one machine that is more conscious than the other. But that is, I believe, precisely its strength. If consciousness is a basic feature of the universe, your theory of consciousness ought not to provide you with any such information, otherwise your theory would have some internal components and consciousness would not be the terminal level of analysis. Would you expect string theory to tell you how to make strings?
I would expect it at least to make testable predictions. The difficulty of doing so is an argument made by some physicists against its value, notably Lee Smolin. But at least there is something there, ideas with mathematical structure and parts, that one can study to attempt to get observable consequences from. I don't see even that much with panpsychism. We don't know what consciousness is, only that we experience it ourselves and recognise it from outward signs in people and to various extents in other animals. What can I do with the claim that rocks are conscious? Or trees, or bacteria?
Strictly speaking, what can you do with the claim that "apples are red"? Can you test apples for their inherent redness in a way that doesn't rely on your own petulent insistence to magically intuit the redness of apples? Ofcourse not, whatever chemicals you show to exist in the skin of an apple to prove its redness will rely on an association between that chemical and that colour which you will itself defend on the grounds of being able to see that the chemical produces redness in certain circumstances. Your ability to use the concept of redness to distinguish red apples from yellow ones similarly relies on your having direct, unmediated knowledge of redness. Conceptual analysis has to terminate somewhere, and it might as well (and arguably, ought to) terminate with whatever ideas we find necessary but impossible to investigate.
What can you do with the claim that people are conscious?
I can tell this to someone who is unfamiliar with them, and they will be able to predict what they will look like. (Of course, we are both glossing over the irrelevant detail that apples come in a variety of colours.) They will also be able to predict something of their objectively measurable reflectance properties.
But this is well into the land of Proves-Too-Much. What can I do with the claim that water is made of hydrogen and oxygen, that doesn't rely on "your own petulent insistence to magically intuit" (we're into the land of Straw Men also) its constitution? No, whatever (etc.etc., paralleling your own paragraph).
I can describe my sensation of my own presence, and say that this is what I am talking about. If the other person experiences something that my words seem to describe, then they will recognise what I am talking about.
Can you do anything similar with the claim that rocks are conscious? You can say, whatever conscious experience is, that you and I recognise, rocks have it as well. But that doesn't help me recognise it in a rock.
If rocks are conscious, so presumably are corpses. How does the consciousness of a corpse relate to the consciousness that animated it in life?
There's an ancient philosophical chestnut: "is my red your red"? So this is in fact not clear at all.
Same argument as for the chemicals applies. You won't be able to make any useful prediction that doesn't ultimately rely on your ability to simply perceive red.
Derive its chemical properties. There is some intuition involved in your knowledge of mathematics, but that's not the same as relying on an innate intuition as to its constitution. There was some point in time when the constitution of water was unknown, and anyone with enough knowledge of chemistry would have been able to make valuable predictions about the behaviour of water under various experiments once they learned how it was constructed, which did not rely on his ability to intuit the H20ness of water.
It doesn't help you recognise it in somebody with total bodily and facial paralysis either. Does it mean that it's nonsensical to ascribe consciousness to such persons?
By degree of complexity and organization, if nothing else.
I don't know what point you're making now. Of course I see my red and from my description of the apple he will know to expect his red. It makes no difference to the present topic whether his red is the same as mine or not. It will make a difference if one of us is colourblind, but colourblindness is objectively measurable.
How do we measure the complexity and organization of the consciousness of a corpse at above zero?
That there are meaningful statements that cannot be empirically grounded - and the fact that you cannot communicate your own specific experience of redness to someone else shows that it's not empirically grounded: nobody would (or at least, I've never found anybody who seemed to) argue that the concepts of molecular theory or other statements about the material world are similarly ineffible. Insisting that any characterization of the nature of conscious experience in general is superfluous if it yields no predictive power (even if it resolves conceptual issues) is to insist that - categorically - statements that don't make any predictions about the material world are vacuous. The experience of colour as such serves as one particular counterexample.
My entire point is that the idea that you could measure consciousness under any circumstances whatsoever, of a rock, a tree, a person or a corpse, follows from an incorrect application of empirical epistemic standards to conceptual problems.
A blind man once said that although he had never experienced red, he imagined that it was something like the sound of a trumpet, which I think is pretty good. And fictionally:
— David Gemmell "Legend"
Medics routinely assess the state of consciousness of patients. People routinely, automatically assess the states of the people around them: whether they are asleep or awake, whether they are paying attention or daydreaming.
To me, our experience that we have experience, and our simultaneous inability to explain it, amount to our ignorance about the matter, not a proof that there is any conceptual error in seeking an explanation.
ETA: BTW, I'm not the one who's giving you a -1 on every post in this thread, and I wouldn't even if I was not one of the participants.
What they're testing is the patient's responsiveness - If the internal, private experience of consciousness were open to measurement we could simply knock a tree with a rubber hammer or what have you instead of analysing the problem. Any metric of consciousness that you could invent, applicable to humans, would entail some assumptions about how consciousness manifests in humans or at best in animals. You'd be excluding the possibility of measuring it in non-living matter a priori. In effect you'd be defining consciousness to mean whatever is measurable: responsiveness, intelligence, capacity for memory, etc. This is why it's a conceptual problem - if consciousness is conceptually distinct from those measurable qualities, then how could you justify the use of any particular metric?
It's not a matter of proof; I find panpsychism appealing on abductive grounds - if it were true then it wouldn't be surprising that human beings are capable of consciousness.
Re. downvotes: I march toward the sound of gunfire, so I'll probably be in negative reputation before too long.
We need to look at the brain activity, whether seeing "red" activates the same parts of the brain for different people.
Take one person, show them a red screen, a green screen, a blue screen. Record the brain activity. Do the same thing with another person. Based on the first person's data, looking at the brain activity of the second person, could you tell what color do they see?
Thoughts and feelings are not immaterial, they can be detected, even if we still have a problem decoding them. Even if we don't know how exactly a given pattern of brain data creates the feeling of "red", these things could be simple enough so that we could compare patterns from different people, and see whether they are similar.
Such an experimental procedure depends on materialism; and materialism itself is the topic under scrutiny. Which is to say its results would under-determine the materialist/psychist dichotomy.
It can in principle, in the same way that atomic theory eventually told us how to transmute lead into gold. It's the right approach -- decompose into simple parts and understand their laws.
It's a long stretch from Epicurean atoms to nuclear physics, too long for me to regard the former as an explanation of the latter. Atomic theory wasn't of any use until Bernoulli used the idea to derive properties of gases, and Dalton to explain stoichiometric ratios. Pan-psychism consists of nothing more than hitching the word "consciousness" to the word "matter", and offers no direction for further investigation. Principles that suggest no practice are vanity.
Ok, but if you have a choice of theory while being an ancient Greek, the rightest you could have been was sticking with the atomic theory they had. Maybe you are an ancient Greek now.
Panpsychism offers a way forward in principle, by reverse-engineering self-report. Folks like Dennett aren't even addressing the problem.
What could they do, what did they do, with their atomic theory? Conceive of the world running without gods, and that's about it, which may be significant in the history of religion, but is no more than a footnote to the history of atomic theory.
What can we do with panpsychism?
In principle, try to construct a mapping between experience self-report and arrangements of "atoms of experience" corresponding to it.
Even if they ended up doing nothing, they were still better off sticking with the atomic theory, than with an alternative theory.
Rocks can't talk. Experience self-report only helps for those systems that are capable of reporting their experience.
Panpsychism might be an interesting idea to think about, but it is a question, not an answer. Does everything have a soul? (I use the shorter word for convenience.) If I split a rock in two, do I split a soul in two? If not, what happens when I separate the pieces? Or grind them into dust? Are the sounds of a blacksmith's work the screams of tortured metal in agony? Do the trees hear us when we talk to them? Do we murder souls when we cut them down? Does the Earth have a single soul, or are we talking about some sort of continuum of soul-stuff, parallel to the continuum of rock, that is particularly concentrated in brains? Is this soul-stuff a substance separate from matter, or a property of the arrangement of matter? An arrangement that doesn't have to be the sort we see (brains) in the definitive examples (us), but almost any arrangement at all will have a non-zero amount of soul-nature?
Plenty of fantasy story-seeds there, but I see nothing more.
Yup. Still useful (just very very hard).
Not super interested in arguments from incredulity.
Note that I am not aware of any competitor in the market place of ideas that offers any way forward at all.
That was an argument from the current absence of any way of answering these questions. It is not that the hypothesis is absurd, but that it is useless. As I said before, panpsychism merely utters the word "conscious" when pointing to everything.
You can do experiments on people to investigate how consciousness is affected by various interventions. Drugs, TMS, brain imaging, etc. There's lots of this.
Here's a rock. It's on my bookshelves. How does panpsychism suggest I investigate the soul that it claims it to have?
All philosophical concepts are in a sense useless except insofar as they can limit what you attempt to do, rather than open new avenues for investigation. Panpsychism limits the possibility of investigating the ultimate nature of mind in the same sense that materialism limits the possiblity of investigating the ultimate nature of matter - given that everything is made of mass-energy, you could never disconfirm "X is composed of mass-energy". Materialism is quite useless, in the same way as Panpsychism.
You keep saying panpsychism is useless, and I keep saying it's not. Do you understand why I am saying that? I am not proposing we ask a rock. I am proposing we ask a human, and try to reverse engineer from a human's self report. That is very very hard, but not in principle impossible.
Panpsychism of the kind I am talking about does not make claims about souls, it makes claims about "consciousness as a primitive in physics." Adding primitives when forced to has a long history in science/math.
This is new to me, but googling "panpsychism reverse engineering", "panpsychism reverse-engineering self-report", "panpsychism self-report" doesn't bring anything that seems relevant. Has this been discussed anywhere?