[tananan]

This kind of panpsychistic talk to me ends up feeling more closer to a reductive materialism than what I would firstly associate Chalmers with ("hey, did you forget you can experience stuff?"), which is probably just my ignorance with his work.

Because yes, you acknowledge "experience", but you make it a function of a physical state described in such and such a way. In the same way that a set of particles at points A, B, C, .. correspond to such and such a (e.g. electric) field strength at point Z, we now imagine it could correspond also to such and such an experience.

It's just barely "experience" on its own terms. and elicits a kind of epiphenomenalism and powerlesness. The thermostat*, after all, doesn't choose anything nor does it profess to have any agency. So agency ought to end up some kind of ephiphenomenal "observable" of a system.

But besides being deflationary in this distasteful way, what bothers me with pictures like this is that they make use of entirely subject-made divisions between objects and their environments, and presume that they might correspond to experiences because - why not? Why not thing of the bottom and upper half of thermostat as corresponding to two fields of experience? Or the quarters, sixtheents, and so on until we get to individual atoms.

The thermostat doesn't "care" if I think of it as the wax and glass separately, or as a single object containing both. But we do have a unified field of experience, and it doesn't matter how another person "cuts us up" in their mind, whether it is as atoms interacting, organs behaving in unison, or just as a "body".

It seems silly to say that between me and Bob having our separate experiences, there is an experience corresponding to "me and Bob", supposedly free-floating somewhere just by virtue of the two of us being cognizable as a physical system.

It turns "experience" and that infamous "qualia" from something that's the most direct and obvious to a weird phantom as the output of a presumed equation which maps some description of a physical state to an "experience".

No wonder you'll find people who'll retort that they don't experience things or that their consciousness is illusory - they have these weird detached notions of experiences to fight against.

* I imagined a thermometer throughout reading this piece, hence the mention of wax and such. It doesn't really change the point so I'm leaving it.

[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”.