[evunveot]

The article talks about a philosophical concept called "dual-aspect monism" which, in the author's interpretation, basically means that everything we think of as physical/material has some kind of consciousness, and that our own consciousness emerges somehow from the interactions of the elementary consciousnesses of the particles in our brains. So consciousness is the hardware of reality and physical phenomena are the software, an inversion of the typical materialist view. (As a programmer, I'm not sure that metaphor really works, but I'll allow it.)

The author presents this as an avenue for confronting the likelihood that even a perfect understanding/modeling of the physical characteristics of a brain is unlikely to reveal anything about consciousness or subjective experience itself.

Seems plausible to me. Reality tends to make sense, so if it's most likely impossible to make sense of consciousness by studying the brain, there's probably some other way to look at it.

The idea that fundamental particles like electrons have some kind of subjective experience was hard to swallow at first, but then I thought about my cat. It's safe to say that a cat's consciousness is more primitive than a typical human's. You can also say that cats (at least once you get to know them) are a lot more predictable than people and have a smaller set of possible behaviors and reactions. If my cat sees a bug on the wall, she's going to do her weird hiss-snarl thing at it just about 100% of the time, and there's 0% chance she's going to roll up a newspaper and swat it.

If the consciousness of a particular entity can be ranked in comparison to that of other entities — like I would rank my consciousness as "higher" than my cat's — and if entities with "lower consciousnesses" have fewer possible behaviors or reactions to stimuli (like my cat compared to me, or a broccoli plant in my garden compared to my cat), then it's easy to imagine that something as elementary as an electron could be conscious in some way and still obey what appear to be totally deterministic rules. (Electron may have been a bad example since we can't really observe them like we can cats, but the point stands.) Another way to state it would be that as consciousness rises, so does free will (or, at least, scope of behavior).

I'm also reminded of:

John 1:1-3 (NKJV) — "In the beginning was the Word[0], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logos

Of course, consciousness potentially being "the hardware of reality" doesn't necessarily mean God exists. But it fits.

[mrec]

> Reality tends to make sense, so if it's most likely impossible to make sense of consciousness by studying the brain, there's probably some other way to look at it.

Reality tends to make sense on scales and in environments where making sense of reality conferred an evolutionary advantage on the brain-haver. Absent that, not so much. We're great at intuiting about ballistics in a gravitational field and atmosphere, less so about WTF is happening in wavefunction collapse.

> The idea that fundamental particles like electrons have some kind of subjective experience

What would it be an experience of? Without sense-organs and brains or equivalents thereof, what could anything be conscious of? If sense-organs and brains are somehow hard-epiphenomenal, not really required to experience the universe, why did organisms bother to evolve them?

[slowmovintarget]

> ...about WTF is happening in wavefunction collapse

That's in large part because that particular term is a hand-wave assertion firmly in the realm of the Copenhagen interpretation. i.e. "It just happens, and we'll call it this." The term presupposes there is a differences between a quantum realm and a classical realm, rather than quantum rules pertaining continuously (like the Many Worlds interpretation supplies).

I think the notions expressed in the article don't really resolve anything except to emphasize there is much we don't understand.

[evunveot]

> Reality tends to make sense on scales and in environments where making sense of reality conferred an evolutionary advantage on the brain-haver.

I get your point, but I was just making an observation: historically, when we encounter something that doesn't seem to make sense (like the weird orbits of the planets around the Earth) there tends to be something we haven't thought of yet that makes sense (the Sun is actually in the center). I'd say that's been the case more often than not, hence reality "tends to" make sense (in the end).

There are things we can't explain in cosmology and quantum physics, but they generally still make sense enough that we can name them and make calculations that take them for granted. Being able to explain something just means putting a name on it and describing what causes it using other things you've put a name on and described using other things you've put a name on .... Things can still make sense in terms of being consistent even if we can't explain them (in terms of other things).

> What would it be an experience of? Without sense-organs and brains or equivalents thereof, what could anything be conscious of?

I think you're begging the question. The easy answer to all of this is that consciousness isn't actually a thing, but grant me that we're conscious beings with subjective experiences ("I think therefore I am"). What the article's talking about is the idea that you can tear apart your sense organs and your brain molecule by molecule and you'll never find the place where all that tissue interfaces with your consciousness. There's no physical vessel where your eye organs finally plug into your experience of vision.

The materialist view is that consciousness must therefore be something that emerges out of the complex interactions of the neurons and whatnot in your brain, because the atoms that make up your brain are the only thing there, so what else could it be? The article proposes the possibility we've got it backwards, that consciousness is what's real, and the matter we observe is some kind of consequence of the consciousness-es that exist in everything and interact and combine to create different kinds of consciousness-es that have different experiences. I think that's what he means by panpsychism. Something like that. Hey, it's a brand new idea to me, too.

The idea might be that you have a brain because you're a consciousness that thinks, you have ears because you're a consciousness that responds to perturbations in the air, and so on. So what you experience as sound is an interaction between your consciousness and the consciousness of the air vibrating against your eardrums ... and if you damage your eardrums you no longer experience sound because ... the part of your consciousness that experiences sound is linked to the part of the material world that looks like your eardrum?

That's a little woo-woo even for me, but compared to that it's not completely out there to speculate that an electron "experiences" gravity and electromagnetic forces and responds accordingly because that's the type of consciousness it has, or rather the type of consciousness that responds in that way to those forces looks like (or manifests as) an electron. Unclear whether forces are conscious, too, in this model, but I'd guess so.

Conceptually, as an interesting inversion, it kind of reminds me of Dawkins' "selfish genes," or at least the pop-sci misunderstanding of it, where you think of the genes as having motives. I'm not thinking about it too hard, but it seems like it would be tough to harmonize panpsychism with genetics.