Close. I think your misrepresenting pansychism. I think if panpsychism is a viable theory, it would need to be defined within this context. 1 year ago. Rather, it is the exposure and destruction of bad ideas.” Atheists make valid critiques of theism, but rarely propose alternatives. Close. Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts. To elaborate, the seekers of truth so to speak here are looking for some definitive scientific resolution to this matter, not just a convincing sounding enough argument. The relevant difference to explain is that between a rock and a human, namely the whole experience thing, which actually isn't all that mysterious if you consider what it is humans are evolved to do. Materialism The idea that the material world is all that exists. Thats a fairly large claim to make with zero backing or scientific or philosophical conversation to support it. How is illusionism not analogous to saying the physical universe is an an illusion, or doesnt exist without a conscious experiencer as some new age spiritualists say, and thus dissolving this eerie mystery of how matter originated in the first place. I've written a fair few critical posts about panpsychism, the idea that the "hard problem of consciousness" is solved by positing that all matter in the Universe is conscious. There is no "my" consciousness. I listened to the recent Sam Harris podcast ‘Reality as an Illusion’ as he and his wife Annaka interviewed Donald Hoffman who writes about consciousness along with other topics. "experiential component as a fundamental property" / "experiential part embedded in its fundamental particles", ( I think it's the right place for your post). It is almost equally as hard as the Hard Problem. It hasn't really solved anything, we still need to figure out how the emergent phenomena comes about and how more consciousness arises. Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts. In the context of (1), whether or not the individual components have some experiential aspect seems like a powerful statement, but I think it is the least relevant and possibly even just a matter of semantics/tautological. I.e. “ According to panpsychism, ... Obviously, that's not a successful argument with many– it is the age of Sam Harris, after all– but there's a trail of tears in the history of science, leeches and junk DNA and behaviorism, because of air-tight logic devoid of story. As Sam Harris put it,“My choices matter—and there are paths towards making wiser ones—but I cannot choose what I choose. Panpsychism is a new concept for me, and I like the idea of consciousness as a fundamental property of matter. The pairing problem, it breaks entropy and so on. Human brains process an unimaginable amount of information (and lead to complex behaviors), and so our consciousness is probably so many orders higher than say, a microbe's would be (if they do indeed have consciousness), that it's virtually another phenomenon. In this episode Sam Harris speaks with philosopher David Chalmers about the nature of consciousness, the challenges of understanding it scientifically, and the … But consciousness itself - and this becomes clear when you meditate and, as Sam says, "look for the one who is looking" and fail to find anyone there at all; Consciousness itself is indivisible, cannot be quantized, localized. "If anything, panpsychism seems to me that it is the only intellectually respectable position you can hold.". “How does matter give rise to consciousness?” (response to Sam Harris) by Matthew D. Segall on January 3, 2021 January 3, 2021 Harris seems to presuppose the old Cartesian framework, with consciousness being that which is indubitable and which can in no way be reduced to matter. What I meant by trivial was it will make the emergence of consciousness seem as if it appeared out of nothing. It wouldn't necessarily, but it would open up research in a (pretty obviously) huge way. (There of course are others, e.g. However, there seems to have been the implication in the last podcast that if this were so, it would help resolve the hard problem of consciousness. I tend to agree with you that I hardly see how this can be the case. However, my whole brain is doing something that all those chair atoms are not and that remains deeply mysterious. Physical science handles what matter does-- behavior, structure, relation, and so on. Archived. Or does it exist in yours too, in that case? It's useless. Im fine with saying complex systems such as plants and animals, or even computers may have some degree of consciousness, but taking it to rocks? How? Differentiation happens via more or less entanglement, so yes there is personhood and thoughts, feelings, identity and so on - those are all localized. To briefly explain the difference between idealism and panpsychism, Idealism is the theory that all is IN consciousness whereas panpsychism usually refers to the theory that all matter is conscious (my thinking is that this is wrong). Archived. Sam Harris; Forum Home; Faith and Reason ; The Hall of Holy Grails; Thread 1 2 3 > Last › Panpsychism . That being the case, consciousness is an infinite singularity, and that singularity is... you. I’m not quite sure if this is the right sub to post this. Profile . Will panpsychism go the way of vitalism? In defense of panpsychism. Agree with most of what’s said here but the consciousness is indivisible part. "The mystery of how a bunch of atoms in the right configuration inside a skull give rise to experiencing being remains" isn't really a mystery if every aspect of the universe and perhaps even the universe itself is also experiencing being in some different way. Other forms of property dualism have failed. I’m not quite sure if this is the right sub to post this. As we imbibe (prudently, of course) we receive revelation ... and this leads to salvation. Dualism and epiphenomenalism don’t help us move forward in trying to solve the hard problem. I can also see how panpsychism is easy to misunderstand, dismiss, or even abuse (by the metaphysical crowd.) I’ll grant u that this looks unfalsifiable, but so do the other two views. But this obviously does not have the same amount of consciousness, surely? r/samharris: A place to discuss Sam Harris and to have difficult conversations with civility. Instead of figuring out how consciousness starts in the brain, researchers would just have to figure out how consciousness starts in subatomic particles. What does that day about the split brain patients? However, there is still the combination problem, which is a very big problem. Atheist philosophy is usually based on materialism. This view, though, isn’t clear on how these separate entities interact. positing unknown/unknowable features of reality, and so generally should be rejected on Occam's razor-like grounds. The advantage being that it managed to illuminate many of my disagreements with Annaka and her husband, Sam Harris. I think the answer you’re looking for is that the chair is an artifact. The larvae (brain/matter) --> cocoon (black box) ---> butterfly (consciousness) metaphor from "what it's like to be a bat" is a good one imo. According to panpsychists, consciousness exists within every corner of the universe. That in no way solves the hard problem, or makes it "trivial" that just takes the conversation out of the falsifiable realm of conversation and makes it a fairly wuwu spiritualism. I think the opposite is true. In this model, consciousness is a formless nothingness that acts as a 'container' for everything in reality, just as it acts as a container for everything in our direct experience. u/seeking-abyss. Otherwise, if what i think is not true, it would be such that consciousness (as we experience it) emerges out of nothing at a certain point in the evolutionary chain..This is the core of the hard problem. I strongly disagree that it is the only intellectually respectable position. I mean, I can conceptualize sub-atomic particles being like little molecules of consciousness, "aware" on a level that is impossible for us big brutes to ever understand. Contents of consciousness: what it is like to be. Panpsychism is for people who like a good mystery, eliminativism/deflationary theories are for the strongly empirically minded. Total Posts: 209. Pom’ / Flickr. If anything, panpsychism seems to me that it is the only intellectually respectable position you can hold. Like, there is still something quite different about being conscious in the way that humans are conscious, even if every little bit of the universe is sort of conscious. Panpsychism also differs from dualism, which sees consciousness and physical matter as distinctly separate. That to me seems like a fool’s errand. Not so long ago, scientists thought that the property of ‘being alive’ could never be explained by physics or chemistry. Sure, it is easy to have thoughts and opinions about … It also doesn't require any shift in the way you think the world functions, which is particularly appealing to me. r/samharris. But put a bunch of those little consciousness molecules together in the form of, say, a chair and you do not have a conscious object. Is anything going to come out of the cannon? But there is “tree consciousness.” Is the wood in the chair still wood consciousness or is it dead? Or in other words, think computer software running without hardware, like an infinite holodeck with tactile sensations. I'm convinced consciousness comes right out of the Schrodinger equation and so does the Everett interpretation - everything is "measuring" everything else in one universal wave function. It is less parsimonious, i.e. I'm certainly intrigued in the notion that consciousness is an inherent property of existence. Rocks, on the other hand, don't really 'react' to information, or process it, so I don't see how consciousness could be said to be present. That is how does this idea of an experience exist"? Nah. But panpsychism’s chief attraction is that it supplies spectacular flights of verbiage by which to amplify one’s “wonder and beauty” mental states to positively grandiose length. Syntax; Advanced Search; New. So somewhere along the line more "consciousness" comes about by the interaction and arrangement of the experiential aspects of its constituent parts. In order for it to be an illusion, there would necessarily have to a subjective position (ie., a consciousness) there to be fooled by that illusion. (2019). Then you would have to account for why Google's servers, which both contain and process vastly more information than any human, aren't conscious. Member. This notion sounds crazy, but the question has been seriously posed. More later if you can't figure out why and I have some time! Tagged annaka harris, consciousness, definition, galen strawson, mind, panpsychism, philosophy of mind, Sam Harris, thomas nagel Leave a comment “Western … This makes no sense whatsoever. It ... Harris, Annaka (2019). If so, who/what made randomness behave like randomness? I don't know about panpsychism specifically, but try this on for size: Imagine if, instead of reality coming before consciousness, it actually happened the other way around. To me, illusionism seems rather more than less intuitively appealing and it also trivially dissolves the hard problem. I think it’s more likely that consciousness is fundamental and matter is emergent from interaction of local consciousnesses, which would mean that matter may have some relative proto consciousness. All Categories; Metaphysics and Epistemology Advocates of panpsychism say that understanding consciousness in an organism like humans is impossible with present approaches, for figuring out how the feeling of "subjective experience",… So there is no “chair consciousness” as there is human consciousnesses or atomic consciousness. 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