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by rotrux 2543 days ago
By this definition my air conditioning system is conscious.
4 comments

I'd personally back such a definition of consciousness, and reframe the question more as one of what level of consciousness (eg complexity of processing, breadth of collected inputs) must an entity possess before we consider its consciousness as being meaningful to us.
Love this way of framing the subject.

Following that line of reasoning, you could say that even the smallest particle/bit of energy has some level of consciousness.

Then you could also say that Earth (and any planet or star), is also conscious, and at a way higher level than we (humans) are.

So we've got to panpsychism. Why not? We're in the company of Thales, Plato, Spinoza and Leibniz.
Thank you for teaching me something new, had never heard of panpsychism before - fascinating.

Do you know of this concept has been incorporated into physics somehow? Are there any models in physics that consider panpsychism as fundamental? (i.e. That consider consciousness as a basic property of matter/energy, just like the 3 special dimensions or time)

Then you could also say that Earth (and any planet or star), is also conscious, and at a way higher level than we (humans) are.

What's the point of the word "conscious" if it's just a synonym of the word "complex"? If it doesn't add anything, it's not worth having the word.

Good point. Don't have a good answer to that.

However, this happens very frequently in humans, we have multiple different languages and even multiple synonyms for a lot of (most?) words in every one of those languages.

At the same time, would correlation of two things make one of them worthless to have/know/understand?

Synonymous != Correlated.

If you're saying they're synonymous, then it doesn't make sense to ask whether you can have one without the other.

So ask yourself, could you imagine something being complex but not conscious, or conscious but not complex? If so, then they're not synonymous and you have something interesting to talk about.

That was exactly the point. According to panpsychism, everything has consciousness.

We us as humans on the other hand, want to compare our consciousness to the one of animals/plants/etc.

Trying to bridge the two things, you could say that everything has consciousness, but that there's a "level" of it, which to make it simple, you could attribute to (or be roughly correlated to) complexity/size.

In a way, it's exactly how gravity is defined.

Exactly. People do this all the time. They project their own experience onto something without taking the time to think if that even applies. Our brain has billions of neurons and trillions of axons, so many that it allows a platform of emergence, not magic. Plants having nothing like this.
How do you know that it isn't?
I don't think so. Being turned on/powered up is not equivalent to being awake. "Awake", at minimum, implies a living subject.
That is just kicking the definition can down the "living" road.