[nuancebydefault]

Each time someone tries to explain in a scientific way what they think is consciousness, you see this analysis phase, breaking it down in steps to the bare minimum. From a scientific point of view, this makes perfect sense.

This leads to two pounts of view - scientific, leading to reduction and more philosophic - there's no way to describe it since it is _super-natural_.

I lean to the more scientific approach, we are not more and not less than the sum of our parts and, each of our parts, at any sub-scale, has some resemblance to a thermostat: some object that reacts on its environment.

[tananan]

The whole thing with Chalmer's hard problem is pointing out that reduction doesn't get you very far. But here he formulates a reductive panpsychist proposal (though only "in theory"). What part this piece plays within his broader thought - I am not sure.

Nonetheless, it is far from compelling even as a "weak-problem" hypothesis and is an abstract angels-on-hairpin musing that truly puts experience outside of the bounds of investigation. Because, after all, if experience is an empty epiphenomenon which exists for any, anyhow-delineated physical system out there, where does that get us? We've made an assumption we cannot prod scientifically, yet it hides behind the scientific veneer of reductivism.

[robwwilliams]

You might enjoy anything written by Humberto Maturana. There are some sharp lines he draws in defining a living system—what he refers to as autopoietic (self-building) systems.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humberto_Maturana

For Hofstadter consciousness requires some form of recursion—what he calls strange loops. Our brains are recursion machines “we” can partly control “ourselves”.