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RobertRies | 1 year ago
This tiny interaction I think is the the entire problem with how panpsychists talk about this.
Some panpsychists might try to actually say that there's a potential that trees and rocks have an internal subjective experience that is in some way comparable to human conscious experience (i.e. they feel some kind of "pain," that "hurts" them, and they "suffer". But I contend we have very little reason to believe that, and a lot of reason not to believe that. For example, with very, very little modification to my biology, I can eliminate this experience in myself (painkillers, anesthesia, other drugs, falling into a deep sleep, etc.)
Once you even slightly disrupt the structure of our brains functioning, it all falls apart. We feel nothing.
I think even most panpsychists would not take the above position, and would instead say "oh well, plant consciousness is entirely unrecognizable and might not even have reasonable continuity of consciousnesses. "Pain" wouldn't even make sense to a plant or a rock. We're just saying that the matter that constitutes plants and rocks have a very tiny (relative to humans) kind of "experience" but it's a huge mistake to anthropomorphize that, and you shouldn't feel like you're making grass "suffer" by cutting it.
^and if it's the second case, it's unprovable and uninteresting and "literally meaningless. Irrelevant."
llamaimperative|1 year ago
Okay well that's silly and I've not met even one panpsychist who believes this "comparable to human conscious experience" portion
> Once you even slightly disrupt the structure of our brains functioning, it all falls apart. We feel nothing.
This isn't true. You can literally cut a brain in half and you appear to get two separate consciousnesses in one skull.
> I think even most panpsychists would ...
Sure... so why are you spending so much breath attacking the obviously weak form of the argument?
> ^and if it's the second case, it's unprovable and uninteresting and "literally meaningless. Irrelevant."
There have been lots of things, in fact pretty much all of them, that were unprovable and uninteresting until they weren't. People have to work hard to build the frameworks to talk about, test, and ultimately understand the universe. That's what people are trying to do with consciousness. It can be "too early" for your tastes, but that doesn't make the endeavor meaningless.
RobertRies|1 year ago
You, yourself, and Philip Goff and others talk about how "we might want to treat trees differently" suggesting (correct me if I'm misunderstanding you) that cutting a tree might "hurt" the tree, or cause "pain" to the tree, which is exactly what I mean by "comparable to human conscious experience."
> This isn't true. You can literally cut a brain in half and you appear to get two separate consciousnesses in one skull.
What you're saying doesn't address what I'm saying. I did not say that, exhaustively, all changes to the brain disrupt everything. Rather, I will clarify that there exist a subset of extremely small disruptions you can make to the brain that "turn the lights off" of consciousness in humans. Among them are a fairly tiny dose of anesthetic, or not breathing for about 5 minutes.
> Sure... so why are you spending so much breath attacking the obviously weak form of the argument?
Because I'm replying to a comment that suggests we might treat trees differently (if Panpsychicism were true). I would consider a statement like that to be the first category of panpsychist.
> ... but that doesn't make the endeavor meaningless.
I didn't say the endeavor is meaningless. I'm a strong proponent of prodding anything we can about consciousness, or anything in our universe for that matter. What's "too early for my tastes" is to believe the Panpsychist hypothesis is currently the best explanation.