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IlyaShpitser comments on My recent thoughts on consciousness - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.
I was just using "soul" to avoid typing out "consciousness" all the time. But perhaps we are talking at cross purposes? My understanding of the word "panpsychism" is the doctrine that everything ("pan-") has whatever-you-want-to-call-it ("-psych-"), and from the etymology, dictionaries, philosophical encyclopedias, and the internet generally, that is how the word is universally used and understood.
"Consciousness as a primitive" is independent of that doctrine, and needs a different name. "Psychism"? (Materialists will call it "magic", but that's a statement of disagreement with the doctrine, rather than a name for it.)
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?