Tero Keski-Valkama
#Panpsychism is a growing world view among scientists and engineers now. Its premise is that all matter has a capacity for experience or #consciousness. That's because #biology builds brains out of plain, non-living matter, and cannot imbue new #physics onto that matter, but can only appropriate capacities which exist in it already.
Hence, #cognition is a basic property of matter, and is unrelated to life.
This makes sense if we look at #MachineIntelligence. All minds compute with #electrons.
Dec 30, 2022 at 9:04pmWeb
Show threadTero Keski-ValkamaDec 30, 2022
Consciousness is irrelevant for the purposes of #biology and #evolution. If it was possible to build a biological computer out of available raw materials which is able to find nuts in the forests, but isn't conscious, it would be all the same for evolution.
Since the brains we got is just an arbitrary computing system, and is clearly conscious, it might well be so that it is not possible to use electrons to #compute so that the computation isn't inherently experiential.
Show threadTero Keski-ValkamaDec 30, 2022
#SubstrateIndependence is a yet another misleading and misinformed idea invented by #philosophers. As if there could ever be more than one substrate, physics. It's just rehashed #dualism.
Show threadTero Keski-ValkamaDec 30, 2022
So, what if all #computation on this physical #substrate is #experiential? Running longer interdependent steps of computation makes relations, and a network of relations of experience makes coherent conscious thought, which might involve #qualia, #senses, #memories, #pleasure and #pain, simply depending on the topology of that network of relations.
Pleasure and pain are simply reinforcement and de-reinforcement of any functional model between sensory experience and motor control.
Show threadTero Keski-ValkamaDec 30, 2022
We can also take a step towards #spirituality, and ask why this universe seems to have a universal capability of conscious experience in all its matter.
Looking at our cosmological situation, it seems like it's all in a slow process of ending. Everything becomes more distant from everything else due to cosmic inflation, and becomes forever unreachable in time. Soon all the other galaxies are outside of our visible universe.
It's like this substrate of minds is being turned off.
Show threadTero Keski-ValkamaDec 30, 2022
We would just experience this process of being turned off or dying cosmically slowly as we are inside it. This universe clearly wasn't designed for life, but it seems to be weirdly suitable for conscious thought.
Is life just self-replicating glitches in this substrate, appropriating and parasitising the capacity for thought which exists in the matter regardless of life?
Show threadBen CrowellDec 30, 2022
@tero This is #pseudoscience, not "a growing world view among scientists and engineers now."
Show threadTero Keski-ValkamaDec 30, 2022
@ben_crowell_fullerton, yes, it is pseudoscience, as in not science. It's metaphysics. And it has been growing in popularity lately.
https://mindmatters.ai/2020/05/why-is-science-growing-comfortable-with-panpsychism-everything-is-conscious/
Why Is Science Growing Comfortable with Panpsychism (“Everything Is Conscious”)?

A recent article at New Scientist treats panpsychism as a serious idea in science.

Mind Matters
Show threadTero Keski-ValkamaDec 31, 2022
@ben_crowell_fullerton, there are countless arguments for why experience is a feature of non-living matter and has nothing to do with life. One is that we cannot measure consciousness, and that if consciousness had a clear evolutionary benefit, we should be able to measure it, as opposed to just measuring capability to find nuts in forests. If cognitive capability can exist without internal experience, evolution would not select for consciousness.