[bubblyworld]

I agree with the spirit of your comment, but I also think it's a little bit premature to say that life is readily explained as chemical reactions. For instance, ecologists study natural selection (i.e. the dynamics of life as we know it) at a much higher level than that, and for good reason! We really don't know how to reduce high-level aspects of behaviour down to matter and interaction yet - not even close.

Biology is the ultimate spaghetti code - there are causal loops between all the layers of abstraction (I guess as a result of enormous optimisation pressure and lots of time). I think that makes full-scale reductionism like you're describing a bit hopeless.

[llamaimperative]

I didn't mean to suggest we understand every interaction from molecular to organism scales, but there's no reason to think that that stack of unfathomably complex and highly chaotic interactions is anything but chemical/electrical/thermal interactions.

[bubblyworld]

I know that's not what you meant, but consider that there may be no feasible way to map those interactions onto a theory of chemical/electrical/thermal interactions even in principle. Scientifically speaking, in this case it's meaningless to say that those interactions "are nothing but chemical/electrical/thermal interactions", because you have no predictive power at that level whatsoever! This can true even though the constituents of any organism must obey the laws of physics at a microscopic scale.

edit: Anyway, we probably don't disagree about much here, I just think that this appeal to reductionism is a common fallacy.

[llamaimperative]

It's not really true that we have "no" predictive power. Everywhere we've ever looked in any system anywhere in the universe, we've found nothing except the reactions that I've described. Even in biological systems.

We use this knowledge every day to predict and produce new drugs (though again, we are not very good at it).

[bubblyworld]

We have found plenty besides those fundamental reactions - sticking to the theme of evolution, take the concept of the gene in natural selection. In that context, genes and their interactions have enormous predictive power. Fundamental interactions between particles do not.

Genes may be made up of such particles but they are their own concept, with their own interactions, which cannot be reduced to that of their constituents. You could argue that in theory you can measure the state of each particle in all of an organism's genes and simulate them according to the laws of particle physics, but that's not actually possible even in principle, for the simple reason that measuring a system to that degree would destroy it (the uncertainty principle).

There are lots of these "causal blankets" in the world, and I think they're a real challenge to the idea that everything is reducible to particle physics.

[mistermann]

I am extremely and genuinely curious: have you experimented with psychedelics to a high degree?

Personal question, no obligation to answer.

[llamaimperative]

Yes I’ve done psychedelics, though I don’t really trace my (reluctant) belief in panpsychism to that.

Psychedelics are really great at showing you just how much “work” consciousness is doing, and just how fungible all of its contents are. And the most important insight, which is that everything “out there” in the world — everything you experience — is actually an internal, subjective representation.

The way I’ve described it is that we’re all in our own sensoriums, but that is generally totally opaque to us. Psychedelics can temporarily knock that sensorium askew — enough to notice that it’s there all the time and doesn’t have to be configured the way that it happens to be.

The reason I have reluctantly come to believe in panpsychism is because I haven’t heard anything close to a better explanation of when, where, and why “the lights are on.” There’s no reason to think there’s something special about brain matter in particular. There’s probably something special about information processing, but then: what is information processing? Information is just a local reduction in entropy, and all sorts of things are doing that in all sorts of ways all over the universe.

[mistermann]

> Psychedelics are really great at showing you just how much “work” consciousness is doing, and just how fungible all of its contents are. And the most important insight, which is that everything “out there” in the world — everything you experience — is actually an internal, subjective representation.

> The way I’ve described it is that we’re all in our own sensoriums, but that is generally totally opaque to us. Psychedelics can temporarily knock that sensorium askew — enough to notice that it’s there all the time and doesn’t have to be configured the way that it happens to be.

Considering this: do you find it a bit strange that ~all people (including yourself above) write as if the opposite of this is true? I mean sure, "people are imperfect" and "everyone is just expressing their opinion" are attractive memes (cultural "truths" that emerge from the very same simulation), but is there not perhaps something important going on that might be worth paying at least a little attention to?

[llamaimperative]

I’m not sure what you’re referring to?

[mistermann]

> there's no reason to think that that stack of unfathomably complex and highly chaotic interactions is anything but chemical/electrical/thermal interactions.

Did the psychedelics not teach you that knowledge of all like this may not be genuine? And never even mind that, is there good reason to trust what consciousness tells us in the first place? Sure, people have matching stories so that's a good sign, except the stories don't match over time.