Do people who consider that rocks could have a conscience also consider that water could have memory?
I’ll see myself out.
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See, mine is “Everything we call science used to be a branch of philosophy. Philosophy is what’s left, the questions we still ask but haven’t figured out how to answer yet.”
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Yes, it is, but I can’t help but conclude that the writer of that piece doesn’t actually know what a computer is, or an algorithm, or information. Not in the sense a computer scientist means them, not in the sense von Neumann meant them. What he is calling a metaphor isn’t a metaphor. It’s “Here’s a theoretical concept that applies to certain kinds of systems, a mind has these properties of those systems, therefore whatever a mind is, it is also a computer.” That’s the sense that started the ‘metaphor,’ and at that level objecting to it is nonsense. I don’t think we’re in phlogiston/elan vital territory - calling the brain a computer can lead to misunderstanding, but also does explanatory work. Now, it is entirely possible that most researcher in the field don’t have that understanding either, in which case abuse of the comparison as a metaphor becomes dramatically more likely.
Still, for someone to challenge researchers in a field to explain their work without a certain set of concepts, find them unable to do so, and take this as evidence that the concept is damaging to the field… well, maybe their mind isn’t much of an information processing unit. Go ahead, ask a bunch of physicists to explain their work without reference to the words “wave” and “field” (after all, what does quantum mechanics have to do with oceans and meadows?).
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I’ve worked in startup-space for a good portion of my career, and a surprising number of startup CEOs have philosophy degrees. I’ve never run the numbers, but my impression is about 20% of those I’ve come in contact with (and I work high tech).
Also: panpsychism makes a hell of a lot of sense to me. I used to be something of an emergentist , but the more I think of it, the more that consciousness has to be the ground.
And, further, the consequence of time slowing down the faster you move, at all speeds that we travel at, is too small to be noticed. We should obviously completely ignore our intuition when dealing with speeds close to the speed of light, sizes close to the Planck constant, etc.
I think (being charitable) we should to think of panpsychism as a speculative sort of “What if we are looking for the ontological consciousness in the wrong place because our phenomenological consciousness lead us to a bad intuition? Maybe we should try something different.” Not a theory, more like an idea of a line of inquiry that might lead to a theory in an area that is currently struggling with what seems like a very hard problem.
[Replying also to @GulliverFoyle’s gif] How many fists are in eternity?
To go back to the analogy to heat I made earlier, at some point I bet a lot of people would have said, “Rocks have heat in them? That’s silly!” There are some things that we know little enough about that we can speculate in this way and other things we can’t. So it’s not quite on the level of “Penis” but it might be on the same level as “Friendship”. On the other hand, I work on the assumption that rocks do have an amount of “goodness” in them (not “evil”); so my kind of crazy happens to align with the theory.
And, to your point, there just isn’t a good reason to think that consciousness is a very basic part of reality in the same way heat is. Philosophers can’t get their heads around how (to borrow from Žižek) something like perception could come out of a “dumb, flat universe that just is.” But “I don’t understand this so my pet idea that I can understand must be right” is an obviously stupid argument.
A much better philosophical answer to the question of how consciousness arises from matter is “Well, obviously is does so maybe you should just get over your inability to understand that.”
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A good example of the McDaniels-Simmons Ontological Postulate:
Because it’s like that, and that’s the way it is.
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I see you understand how jokes work.
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Thanks for proving that philosophy is not a dead discipline.
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In talking about consciousness, Problem Zero is our assumption that there’s a “there” there – that, while the mechanics of our senses and memories are in principle explainable, there’s some kind of Eye of Consciousness perceiving it all, and this is what people tie themselves in knots trying to characterise and explain.
Almost everyone takes for granted that this is the case, because we “know” from direct observation that our subjective viewpoint exists. The notion is fundamental to thought, in the same way that 1=1 is fundamental to algebra.
But, whatever the eventual conclusion, there are very strong reasons to question this premise. If you’re trying to rigorously solve a mystery, you first need to prove beyond doubt that the mystery exists. And it is not at all trivial to show that the idea of a subjective viewpoint needs to be explained.
I would say that the “mystery” of my subjective viewpoint is exactly like the “mystery” of the North Pole’s longitude – it may be unsolvable, but in a deep and fundamental way it doesn’t need to be solved. From my point of view, everyone else’s consciousness is relatively easy to explain, and everyone else in turn can say the same.
I can’t recommend Daniel Dennett’s book strongly enough, provided you read the whole thing and pay careful attention to the bits you bridle at. He’s very thorough in addressing the usual objections on this subject.
Exactly. The process of science doesn’t include “believe a thing for no reason, see where it takes you”. It does include “there is some evidence we can’t explain using what we currently understand, can we think of and then test a new idea that might explain it?”
There is no evidence that consciousness is a fundamental component of the universe, like matter or energy. There is no reason to believe this. There are no testable hypotheses that come from such a belief. Believe it if you like, but despite Goff’s assertion, it ain’t science.
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I should add that my last post assumes you aren’t working against religious or political biases, but many people are. You won’t get far in thinking about consciousness if you require explanations that
- prove some kind of magical divine spark / soul / etc.
and/or
- “scientifically” assign specialness to certain groups of entities while excluding certain other groups (out of: humans, mentally disabled people, babies, fetuses, people when they’re asleep, other races, computers, gorillas, cows, rocks)
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Jesus, that’s some convenient thinking right there.
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I see you understand how banter works.
A couple years ago my mother was in town visiting, and decided that we needed new dishes (do moms possess group consciousness? Why do all moms think of these things?) so off to Ikea. Fast forward a few months and I still hadn’t figured out what to do with those tiny fucking spoons. So I’m sitting on the couch with my partner, eating cereal, and for the umpteenth time said partner reminds me that I eat said cereal way to fast, slow down you’ll enjoy it more, chew your food, etc. etc. etc. (I enjoy it the same thank you very much) and suddenly it dawned on me: the tiny spoons are for the cereal! Voila, now I no longer have 8 useless baby spoons and I have a slightly less annoyed/bemused partner. Thanks Ma!
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Yes they do. Trees, in particular, can pass resources and information to each other using a peer-to-peer network instantiated over fungi.
But it gets better! Dodder (witches’ hair) can do it, too, and not just for trees!
Naturally, humans are using this newly discovered information about plant connectivity to figure out new ways to subvert and destroy it.
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I prefer quiet cab rides, thanks! 
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Well then you wouldn’t want a philosopher as your cabbie!
I get that you’re making jokes, but I actually think its interesting that so many high tech CEOs studied philosophy.
And I don’t think it’s entirely random. All joking aside, I think that studying philosophy gives one skills in thinking in a convoluted manner that is useful when you’re doing a start up. I’d be shocked to run into a lot of history majors in the C suite (I’m not dissing history, just that its study probably doesn’t prepare you for the C-job).
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Well, not exactly.
The concept of natural selection is rightfully first credited to William Charles Wells, and later Patrick Matthew. Darwin and Wallace may have come up with this idea independently, but it’ll never be known for certain, and Darwin both publicly and privately gave primacy to both Matthew and Wells.
“I freely acknowledge that Mr. Matthew has anticipated by many years the explanation which I have offered of the origin of species, under the name of natural selection.” – Darwin, 13 Apr 1860, Darwin Correspondence Project Letter no. 2766.
“[Wells] distinctly recognises the principle of natural selection, and this is the first recognition which has been indicated.” – Darwin, 1866, included in the forewords to the 4th and subsequent editions of The Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection.
But Darwin did, as you say, develop the idea sufficiently to explicitly remove the need for divine intervention (Matthew apparently believed that beauty was an objective characteristic granted by God, rather than a subjective judgement informed by culture and physiology) and more importantly Darwin wrote a book lots of people were willing to read, as opposed to a medical research paper or dry dissertation on Naval Timber.
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While I don’t give a rousing recommendation to much of his reasoning, Jeremy Narby’s book Intelligence in Nature details a lot of examples of this.
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