[ambrozk]

> So in short: I cannot understand what is the actual substance of subjective experience.

This problem just goes away if you assume that there is no dividing line between the "experience" of you and the "experience" of any other computational system. Actually try to think, what does a computer "experience"? An atom? What does it feel like to be a standing desk?

[odyssey7]

Panpsychism is going mainstream again.

[ambrozk]

It seems like the only solution that's compatible with materialism. If you accept that it "feels like something" to be you, and you accept that your intelligence is just a computational process which differs from others only in the specific computations involved (as I think you should, especially in the age of LLMs), then you must infer that it "feels like something" to be any number of computational processes. If you infer otherwise, you're positing that there's an unmotivated, invisible, in-kind difference between human intelligence and all other physical phenomena which seem to mirror its abilities.

The conclusion I come to, which doesn't actually seem that strange, is that what's special about our experience is the complexity of our thought, our ability to turn extremely high-dimensional raw experience into low-dimensional models of reality, our ability to maintain a sense of mostly-stable identity over a long period of time, our capacity for emotion and sensation. It may "feel like something" to be a rock or a standing desk, but it isn't a very interesting or complicated feeling.

[odyssey7]

If we take the behavior of matter as the observable signs of how it feels — this is true if sensation motivates action — then many rich states of sensation have been observed in subatomic particles.

The computational process of an organism is evolved to operate the organism, toward survival of the species. I don’t think these sensations would necessarily be more complex than those of subatomic particles, but they would need to be directed by the system to represent the state of the system and the observed environment, to link to actions the system could take, and to bias actions toward survival of the system.

[wry_discontent]

I'm sympathetic to panpsychism, but it isn't obvious to me that intelligence should be what's behind awareness.

I've been blackout drunk before, and my brain was capable of intelligence, I got home just fine, but I had no conscious awareness. Same for a dreamless sleep and being put under for surgery.

Additionally, I the observer, can observe and be aware of intelligence which seems to indicate to me that it's something outside of what I'd call "me".

[chlorion]

I think you are still conscious during the blackout, you just don't have a memory of it. Amnesia is the effect here, which is a little different than actually being unconscious the whole time.

When in surgery you really are unconscious though, hopefully at least.

I would compare this to forgetting what exactly you did on this exact day and this exact time one year ago. You can't remember it (most likely), but it doesn't mean you were unconscious during that time.