[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.