[CuriouslyC]

The most fundamental argument for panpsychism is that it obeys Occam's razor FAR better than the "emergent animate matter" hypothesis. Panpsychism requires that the universe updates its state by conscious choice, which we already know happens, so from the perspective of Occam's razor we would actually need to explain why it DIDN'T happen for non-animal matter.

Additionally, if we go with the emergence hypothesis, we have to explain the mechanism by which permutations of the states of matter can create a new dimension of "feeling" and "awareness" where one did not already exist. That's a tall order.

[RaftPeople]

> Panpsychism requires that the universe updates its state by conscious choice, which we already know happens

Can you clarify what we "already know happens"?

Even for humans, it's not clear that "conscious choice" exists and causes changes in state, because we don't know what the mechanism is that can cause a state change other than state at time T-1.

[odyssey7]

Starting from evolution as the cause for the fact that our physical bodies present sensation to our awareness, I have to assume there’s a reason for that to happen.

The obvious answer is that pleasure, pain, ideas, memories, etc. all exist to drive the behaviors that are advantageous in evolution.

It’s possible that there’s a deterministic set of gears in how sensation drives behavior, but the role of experience in driving physical action would be at least one of those components.

So if we take evolution as the cause of life as we understand it, then consciousness is at least a component of physics itself.

[peddamat]

Isn't it assumed that everything is deterministic apart from what is done by the somewhat magical, "free will"?

[digging]

No - quantum uncertainty gives us the assumption that everything is fundamentally random and nothing is deterministic, unless we assume a meta-determinism (or superdeterminism) whereby fundamentally random outcomes are actually predetermined.

How does that relate with the experience of decision making? That's a complete unknown. But the simplest explanation is that free will is simple, once we define it as "the experience of making a decision" instead of the traditional, nonsensical definition of "the act of making a decision that is fundamentally independent from prior events". Usually free will is framed as "choice vs slavery", which is a useless definition because choices can't be made in a vacuum.

In other words, of course we have free will: We feel like we have free will, and free will is simply the feeling of having free will. Conscious decisions (if those even exist!) are physical processes just like everything else in the universe.

[peddamat]

It's very confusing how a relativity works in a non-deterministic world. Brian Greene's illustration of how relativity "slices the loaf" in the Fabric of the Cosmos (https://youtu.be/8Y-JmocB84Y?t=1334) makes it very difficult for me to understand how things work if reality is indeed non-deterministic.

Unless reality is more like Everything Everywhere All At Once, i.e., the Everett many loafs model.

[JohnAaronNelson]

I’m reading the book “determined” right now. It’s pretty good and sums up all the arguments very nicely.

And of course we don’t have free will. We have experience, which fools us into thinking we are in control.

[digging]

> And of course we don’t have free will. We have experience, which fools us into thinking we are in control.

Not sure if you're disagreeing with me, or if you didn't grasp my comment. The quote above is meaningless without defining what free will is and how it can possibly mean anything other than "the experience of decision making".

Decision-making is something that a fully deterministic, non-conscious machine can do. (A motion detector performs decision making based on light input.) Decision-making does not require consciousness. Consciousness is what grants us the ability to experience and reflect on our decision making. It is fair to call that phenomenon "free will."

Defining "free will" as "the ability to make a decision not influenced by our state and inputs (including sensation, memory, etc.)" makes no sense. Decisions are fundamentally dependent on state and inputs*. Any definition of "free will" which ignores that is useless.

[mensetmanusman]

Would need an explanation of why the universe is destined to result in an illusion.

[mistermann]

Indirect Realism as a consequence of evolution + lack of distribution of this knowledge (causing it to be phenomenologically experienced as Direct Realism) as a consequence of culture.

[mensetmanusman]

The world would look a lot different if everything was random. Ever seen noise on a TV?

[digging]

Quantum properties are randomly determined from a set of possible outcomes. (e.g if you measure "up vs down" you will never get "left", but it's physically impossible to know if it will be "up" or "down" until measurement.)

They also happen in context, not in a vacuum. Whether or not I make another cup of coffee might come down to fundamentally random quantum events, but that doesn't mean there's any chance I get up and brew a cup of steamy elephant piss because I don't have any on hand.

[interstice]

If by assumed you mean hotly debated, yes

[BurningFrog]

Not since we were forced to accept quantum physics.

[gradus_ad]

It's important to distinguish choice/will and consciousness. Conscious experience can happen in an entirely deterministic context..they are orthogonal concepts.

[CuriouslyC]

Sort of, but then philosophers have certainly discussed the topic of why would there be conscious experience if it didn't serve any function. It would be cruel irony if consciousness was a vestigial appendage of the cosmos, an unempowered observer. Not a proof of anything just something to think about.

For me, the real driving idea is that what we call physics is the aggregate behavior of conscious entities making choices, rather than being this framework that consciousness can "override" or worse, something that consciousness is forced to sit and observe. That idea simplifies a lot of the mysteries for me.

[a_cardboard_box]

I think the best argument for consciousness having an effect on the physical world is that the physical world contains a formulation of the hard problem of consciousness. If consciousness doesn't affect what words get written, then no discussion of consciousness is actually about consciousness.

[layer8]

Panpsychism requires that we have a solid grasp on what constitutes consciousness, and we don’t. How would you falsify panpsychism? What testable predictions does it make?

[ethanbond]

How do you falsify the claim that all living humans are conscious? Or that none of them except you are? Or that you are not conscious?

This is an inconvenience for every theory of consciousness, isn't it?

[layer8]

I’m criticizing panpsychism as a theory of the universe, not as a theory of consciousness. But even as the latter, neither does it explain much of anything, nor does it make any useful predictions I’m aware of.

Personally I don’t make the claim that all humans or even I myself are conscious, because I find the notion of consciousness to be too ill-defined.

[CuriouslyC]

That is something we can certainly disagree on. I would hope given your fist-hand experience of the universe you would at least posit that you yourself are conscious :)

[joquarky]

It seems like you're trying to apply science outside of its domain. Science is a tool to examine only phenomena that can be repeated and quantified.

[yongjik]

> we have to explain the mechanism by which permutations of the states of matter can create a new dimension of "feeling" and "awareness" where one did not already exist.

You mean, like a newborn baby? That's not a "tall order," that's an everyday affair.

[bdamm]

The newborn baby is "just" an assembly of atoms and molecules. What is it about this particular assembly that makes it so special? That's the key question. It might very well turn out that there is something very special about animate life forms that can only exist inside animate life forms - particular arrangements of molecules, or perhaps a heritage that encodes some quantum states we don't understand, or some feedback loop inside of the baby's brain, or maybe all of it; and these things don't exist inside of a rock or a star or a galaxy (beyond, of course, all the babies that exist inside the galaxy, and outside of the question, did the galaxy will the babies to exist, and is a baby an expression of the galactic sensory apparatus?)

[odyssey7]

A newborn baby is an example of physics at work, rather than an underlying physical law.

[Scarblac]

If absolutely everything is conscious, how come we can go unconscious after a knock on the head?

How come chemicals like alcohol can change our consciousness? Or adrenalin?

How is it that the only consciousnesses we are aware of happen to be located in exactly one human body, rather than say only the upper half of one, or fifteen humans, or any other subdivision of the universe's matter? Why is my consciousness not shared with other people's?

To me the hypothesis "human bodies produce consciousness, probably by some mechanism that's shared by lots of life but not necessarily all" is a lot simpler.

[CuriouslyC]

You don't know that we're unaware when "unconscious" just that we're unresponsive, and we don't have memories of that time. There is evidence that the senses are still active and a lot of brain activity continues.

There is evidence that the human brain contains many consciousnesses, just look into research on split brain studies. I'm sure you've had the feeling of being aware of what was going on but feeling powerless to stop your behavior, as if you were a passenger in your body, at some point in your life, maybe there's more to that than we want to believe.

[Scarblac]

> There is evidence that the senses are still active and a lot of brain activity continues

Why do you mention that if you're arguing that absolutely everything is conscious? Why would brain activity be relevant?

[CuriouslyC]

Because I'm arguing that there is consciousness, the processing systems of the brain are just too disoriented to pull together unitary consciousness sufficient to actively drive the body. Being knocked out doesn't turn the lights out, it just scatters them into a bunch of individual lights that are no longer working together, and don't imprint memories well.

[itishappy]

> Panpsychism requires that the universe updates its state by conscious choice, which we already know happens...

Do we know this?

[CuriouslyC]

You chose to type a reply to me right? I guess you could assume that you are compelled and your free will is an illusion, but honestly that view is shit.

[itishappy]

I'm a lot more confident in my own consciousness than I am of the universe's, but to be honest I'm not entirely convinced of either.

I think the bit that's throwing me is the jump from "we know that consciousness exists" to "therefore the universe as a whole must be is conscious" but I bet I'm misinterpreting this somewhat.

[friend_and_foe]

Not who you're replying to, but I'll take a crack at this and share my ponderings on this topic.

Let's take for granted first that you're convinced of your own consciousness. You're more confident in it you say, though not thoroughly convinced, so let's start there. So in light of the fact that you are not simply a being inside the universe, but an integral, inseparable part of it, is you observing the universe not the universe observing itself? This might not be "the entire universe in totality is a big, pondering mind" but it at least means, again given that you are conscious, that the universe is at least as conscious and aware as you are.

If you're not conscious then there's no starting point from which to even begin this line of inquiry.

[dwaltrip]

You believe in an actual free will? What’s your view on compatibilism?

[lxgr]

You might like one more than the other, and one even might cause you to experience a better (more optimistic, agency-ful etc.) life than the other, but there's absolutely zero empirical proof either way.

[CuriouslyC]

If there is equal evidence for two hypotheses, but one resonates with your personal experience and causes you to live a better life, what could possibly possess you to take the disempowering view?

[lxgr]

Practically leading my life as if I had free will and being convinced I actually do have free will – despite zero evidence either way other than my senses and my reasoning, both of which regularly fail/deceive me in all kinds of situations – are two very different things.

There's of course also a variant of Pascal's wager in here, except that this one is logically sound, in my view: If there is free will, why not make use of it? And if there isn't, my beliefs aren't my choice anyway.

And just like from Pascal's wager, we can't derive any actual information about the nature of the universe and our conscious existence in it from that line of reasoning.

[CuriouslyC]

The main point of disagreement I have with this is that I don't think the notion that your senses and reality are not always perfectly in sync implies that your perception of free will is false. There's a lot of approximating that goes into taking sensory input and generating an experience, that doesn't invalidate your experience of making decisions.

Also, your doubt in your own free will isn't free, it has a cost. Is that doubt serving you in some way to offset that?

[stvltvs]

> that view is shit.

Do tell. I also have strong views about free will, but opposing views are worth more than an offhand dismissal.

[CuriouslyC]

It's disempowering and does not resonate with our conscious experience, and given there is no more evidence for it than the opposite view, I find the idea that someone would choose a world view that tends to cause depression and fatalism to be absurd.

[stvltvs]

There's another option: the Skeptic's choice to withhold judgement when there's not enough evidence.

[CuriouslyC]

That is a choice that entertains both notions. The problem with that is that entertaining the notion that you are a powerless observer of the universe who must abide surfing the waves of fate with no agency is soul crushing for most people. If that choice isn't bringing you some power in some other way, why make it?

[ajross]

> The most fundamental argument for panpsychism is that it obeys Occam's razor FAR better than the "emergent animate matter" hypothesis.

Meh. Seems to me like this is just dressing up the anthropic principle in clerical robes. The scare quotes around the "emergent animate matter" strawman sort of give the game away. There is no such "hypothesis". "Animate matter" is an observation, how it emerged is a question, and a difficult one. But declaring "Because Panpsychism" doesn't constitute an answer any more than "In the Beginning..." did.

[CuriouslyC]

Not at all. The anthropic principle is sort of going in the opposite direction in fact, as it presupposes all these conditions on consciousness then waves a magic wand over all of it because we happen to be able to observe and reason, so of course those conditions were met, end of story, yawn.

Panpsychism says that it doesn't matter how life evolved, because the universe is aware as a matter of fact, so the particulars are unimportant, just the ability to encode, store and transmit information so complexity can develop over time.

[ajross]

So, no, that's a mischaracterization. The Anthropic Principle isn't an explanation or a theory. It's not even science, it's just a philosophical argument putting a boundary around "Things that Make Sense to Talk About". Basically: "If things weren't the way they are we wouldn't be here to talk about them, so let's just not"

> Panpsychism says that it doesn't matter how life evolved, because the universe is aware as a matter of fact, so the particulars are unimportant,

Which is almost exactly a paraphrase of the concept I just elucidated. But with some weird religious imagery attached. I find that uninteresting.

[notahacker]

yeah. It's "some parts of the universe that could replicate much more if they have consciousness developed consciousness" vs "the universe was conscious all along, and so it ensured that other small fractions of it had selection pressures to develop consciousness", and I'm not sure the second explanation is more parsimonious...

[meat_machine]

from wikipedia:

>Occam's razor is the problem-solving principle that recommends searching for explanations constructed with the smallest possible set of elements

it's a general principle or _recommendation_, not some law of the universe. Some people might argue that "God wills it" is the simplest explanation for many things, but that doesn't mean it's true. The simplicity of an explanation doesn't necessarily have anything to do with its validity.

In addition, the introduction of panpsychism, just like the introduction of God into any argument, brings up a whole other set of questions that need to be answered -- additional complexity, which is the opposite of Occam's Razor.

Emergence out of complex systems is arguably the simpler explanation, because it's something that's already been observed, measured, and studied, like storms emerging from simpler principles of weather systems.

Or take your computer or smartphone -- do you truly understand all the mechanisms from which we go from "shocking rocks" to create series of on/off signals, to things like communicating on the internet, or watching videos? Is computing and mathematics some inherent property of silicon? Nearly part of a computer, on some fundamental level, is a relatively simple mechanism, and has an almost useless function on its own. Even for engineers who understand every level of abstraction, it must still be near-miraculous that any of this works, even though these emergent properties are deliberately crafted, well-documented, and understood.

Here's a video about GPT transformers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjZofJX0v4M

His ability to not only understand, but to also effectively communicate these concepts, I'd say makes him one of the smarter people out there. And yet, he remarks, "I don't know about you, but it really doesn't feel like this should actually work." There are still things people don't understand about why AI works the way it does, despite the fact that we built and trained them -- feel free to hit up Claude or your favorite resource for examples on emergent properties. LLMs can be passably apt at things they weren't trained for, and exhibit behaviors weirdly similar to people (like confabulation), despite the fact that their exposure to the world is literally only text.

I'm already imagining ways people could twist this into proof of panpsychism. But the point I'm getting to is that the human body is an absurdly, stupidly complex system of 37 trillion cells. The Milky Way is estimated to have 400 billion stars, at most. Like LLMs, we understand some things about our brains... but the complex interaction of many parts is less easy to understand. The purpose and value of feeling and awareness as a function of survival isn't a "tall order" -- it's just difficult for the human brain to grasp so many moving parts simultaneously. For some people, the complexity of the eyeball alone is proof that there must be a god -- the sheer magnitude of billions of years of brute force trial-and-error is difficult to comprehend.

Human intuition: a potentially powerful, but simultaneously and often error-prone weak force of the human brain.

>Panpsychism requires that the universe updates its state by conscious choice, which we already know happens

[citation overdue]

I think there are are at least two levels of logical fallacy here, not to mention avenues of undefined and fuzzy circular logic, but I've already spent too much time on this. I'd say try pasting that into Claude or another "big AI" and see what their critique is.

[CuriouslyC]

It isn't just about the simplicity of Panpsychism, friend, it's about the big things we have to explain if we rule it out that we are so far from being able to explain as to make us look foolish despite all our supposed knowledge. We don't even have a clue how to explain them, despite building atom bombs and space flight and getting close to artificial intelligence. That to me speaks volumes.

Please explain to me how emergence could create new "dimensions" that didn't exist before. Every emergent system we've ever observed creates unexpected complexity __WITHIN THE CONFINES AND STRUCTURE OF THE SYSTEM__. What you're describing is like if a flock of seagulls moved in unity then teleported to the other side of the earth they were so united - it makes zero sense within the framework, and only by ejecting from the framework can you salvage the notion.

I don't perfectly understand all the steps from zero to smartphone, but I have had enough education to have a decent overview, and I can gain that knowledge if I seek it. What will you study to understand consciousness?

The "emergence" you're describing from LLM behavior is a jump in capabilities that occurs due to complexity, but the LLM is just getting better at what it does, it isn't magically developing the ability to levitate researchers due to emergence, which is what "dumb" matter becoming conscious would be like.

The whole "god in the universe" angle is overblown, the root of panpsychism really is this: We and the rest of the stuff in the universe can perceive, feels, has free will, and makes decisions.

I understand it's hard to let go of your humancentric fallacies. The history of science has been brave men having to fight the power to point out the ways in which humans aren't unique or the center of the universe. Particularly if you're Christian, the idea that everything the bible said about man being god's chosen is bullshit must be a bitter pill to swallow.