My Argument for Panpsychism(ish?)

Philosophy of Mind
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First off, my main argument for the mind being physical is simply that we have never observed a mind independent of a physical brain. With that out of the way, here is why I find panpsychism… More tempting than emergentism.

(Also, I just wanted to say that I don’t think my idea is what would be considered traditional panpsychism, but it’s the only thing I can think to call it)

Emergentism argues that at some point, enough atoms can come together and make something that is conscious. This is like the problem of sand, which is questioning at what point, when you add grains of sand, it becomes a heap. To me, it seems unintuitive that there is that point for consciousness, when one more or one less atom arranged particularly switches it from not conscious to conscious or vice versa.

Instead, what if everything is conscious, at least to an extent. I don’t mean that an electron reflects on its identity or has memory, but, in some sense, it is aware because it reacts. It reacts to the forces of the universe. Our brain is also just a machine of reaction, just with more complex systems. Emergent properties like memory seem much more explainable because it’s just a matter of storing information.

What I’m really arguing is that the consciousness that we have is really just an awareness of the forces of the universe, and this awareness is also possessed by something like an electron. In the case of the brain, this awareness is just made more complex, rather than showing up from nothing.

Anyways, this post has been a bit scattered, and I’m not sure if I conveyed exactly what I wanted to, but feel free to engage or ask questions. This idea is completely experimental and is based more on my intuition.

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This is exactly my thoughts. Maybe the most fundamental version of consciousness is the very reaction of a thing to some event. I think everything is conscious of exactly what is happening to it. But a human doesn’t know what it feels like to be a rock. So it proudly says “I am conscious! But this rock isn’t.” But what if the rock is conscious of everything a rock has to be conscious about. That just wouldn’t include thoughts or complex emotions. One evidence I see for this, beyond pure speculation, is the split brain experiment. Blows my mind!

The most interesting aspect of this though is what I am now naming the nested consciousness framework:

Let’s suppose the self is the result of a complex series of interactions happening every unit of time. Under this theory, the stuff that makes the self would also be conscious of something. And the stuff that makes the stuff that makes the self would also be conscious of something. And on and on… Just like you said for consciousness, it seems odd that there would be a particular point at which you became you. So the stuff that makes the final you is likely very close to you, and that goes for the stuff that makes the stuff that makes you. And on and on…

That leads me to think there is a virtually infinite number of selves that are conscious inside each of us. Each to a slightly lesser degree than the next. Yet no matter how close, they remain inaccecible to the final self. Or perhaps it is this very concept that creates the experience of consciousness this clear…

Either way, it is fascinating to me. Especially how this might relate to altered mind states… like why is it that people are able to have experiences so grand they label them spiritual when they tune out the outside world and look inside-- I suppose? (NDE, Astral Projection, LSD, Salvia). To me there is no way all this isn’t related to consciousness, if consciousness at a baseline is experience.

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My people have arrived! :grin:

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I mean I feel like you’re just giving a different name to the same things. A scientists experiments and finds a particle with certain properties. Decides to call it an “electron” and science world accepts this.

You see the same thing and decide to call it a little conscious ball that reacts to the universe. To me it doesn’t change anything. Names aren’t universal to begin with. And the word “consciousness” isn’t more magical than the word gravity or electromagnetism.

As for the sand heap thing, I perhaps don’t get it as much. Can you tell me exactly when a baby stops being a baby? or exactly when green starts being blue? The point is gradual transformation. It’s not that consciousness magically emerges with enogh atoms it’s that it slowly develops over thousands and thousands of years.

That is of course human consiousness. But again, depending on the story you write with that word you can say that trees are conscious. But since you don’t mean conscious like humans, it is sort of pointless. What you’re saying sounds more like “a tree is a tree but I choose to call that conscious as well cause I like that word.”

This is just my take on the whole thing, hope it helps

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Well, the thing is, under emergentism, consciousness is something that at one point simply comes into existence. There is no fundamental thing that underpins what consciousness is, and instead, after enough atoms come together and form a specific system, consciousness arises as an emergent property. This to me seems unlikely, which is why I am saying that there is a fundamental thing that underpins what consciousness is, this thing is “reactivity” in a sense, and it is possessed by everything like an electron, a tree, a rock, etc.

Yes, they possess a different type of consciousness than humans, but they still possess the fundamental property of “reactivity,” which is what I believe underpins what it means to be conscious.

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So you are a panpsychist, I assume? In that case, do you hold to the type of idea that I described or something different?

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What does it mean to you to conscious. For most people it means the experience of self.

That has taken work. The work of a designer. It is engineered and tuned to enable life. That designer is almost certainly evolution. The mindless process operating through random selection of genes over 3 billion years and through a trillion generations who each played a part.

Its doesnt come from rocks. It doesn’t come from the sorting of sand. Be a bit more grateful for the gift.

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Well would you say that if enough atoms comes together a chair simply comes into existance? Or does it have to be made up of chair to begin with? We humans just decide to call a chair a chair, just as we decided to call consciousness consciousness.

Furthermore if a tree possesses a “different type of consciousness” then you do admit that humans have a unique consiousness. Just call that the only consciousness and we’re in agreement.

I mean wheter you call a tree’s experience “experience” or “living” or “reacting” or "consiousness doesn’t really change anything. It’s just a name we give to something.

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Over the last couple days, I have been explaining what I mean to @Jay, who had been asking me about it. If I have this link right, it starts with this post and jay’s immediately after it.

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Highball, I see it at Existism does. Can you explain how consciousness initially came into existence, so that it could develop?

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I see what you mean. You’re questioning whether or not what the post discusses changes the very definition of consciousness to mean something they like.

Here is what I think: It doesn’t. It simply seeks the purest version of “consciousness.” What is it that humans mean at a core when talking about consciousness.

Consider this analogy: A piece of cloth is wet if there is enough water on it. But isn’t there moisture (thus water) on it even when it’s dry? So if by wet we mean “lots of water on it,” sure, it isn’t always wet. But at a core, it technically always is “watery.” Similarly, if by consciousness we mean “enough thinking faculties” or “complex enough awareness” then sure, not even a micro organism would be conscious, let alone an electron. But at a core, doesn’t it have some smaller form of awareness? That’s all this post is saying. Perhaps it is expanding a definition. Again, depends on what you mean. But to me, it is seeking what we mean most when talking about this.

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I mean I’m definitely no expert evolutionary biologist or an expert on the brain but I would assume the same way the human eye or the human hand “came into existance” so did the human brain. And it operates with an idea of the self and the world. And we decide to call that consiousness.

None of our other organs seems to need a magical property that exists in the universe, why does our brain need one?

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My problem generally is that a universe that is conscious and a universe that isn’t is the same universe. Panpsychism doesn’t change how anything behaves or what anything does. It just calls something a different name and that’s it. It is in that sense completely unrefutable, which is okay, so is religion.

But as I said, if a conscious electron and an unconscious electron is the same thing, the word becomes redundant.

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I just don’t really see how this analogy works. A chair is an object. We assign something the value of chair usually along the lines of whether it can be sat on and has legs and such. Consciousness is a property, and so it needs genuine explaining for how it arises. I am arguing that it doesn’t just emerge from nothing, but that fundamentally what makes consciousness what it is is possessed by all things.

A better analogy would be something like temperature. No single atom possesses a temperature, just like no single atom possesses the type of consciousness the human brain has. But a single atom does possess what underpins temperature, which is velocity, just like how a single atom possesses what I’m arguing underpins consciousness, “reactivity”.

So for a tree, I believe it is, in a sense reactive than an electron and so could be quantified as more conscious, and the human brain is even more reactive, and thus even more conscious. Of course, there are also many different ways consciousness can express itself. The human brain is very unique in its language and self-reflection, but I still think it is fundamentally based upon the same thing that a tree’s consciousness is.

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Well under my view I don’t think a conscious electron and an unconscious electron would be the same because the unconscious one would not be reactive.

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Yeah, this is probably how I would sum up what my post is trying to do. :+1:

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Just to be clear, conscious means (in a nutshell) the ability to react to stimuli under this post.

If particles reacted for a different reason that has nothing to do with consciousness, that is a different stance.

Neither of these views change reality. But one is more accurate than the other in its understanding of the world. So what if it doesn’t change anything about how things work? We are exchanging about an idea, not on how to change the laws of physics.

And I agree that this is so hard to test that it may be almost unprovable / disprovable, but not necessarily full-on impossible. We don’t know that. But to compare that to religion is an insane leap. Coming to adopt beliefs intuitively is also one way to do so. In this case, I combine my heuristics / intuition with some reason to reach this conclusion and propose a different way to understand consciousness. I am not attached to it personally, and it could be the less accurate understanding. No problem.

Outside of the intuitive aspect, here is a piece of reason why I think the pansychism described in this post may be more likely than the alternative:

I read once something along the lines of “once we understand the brain fully, and at no point in its inner workings and formation process does consciousness show up in our equations, we will be forced to recognize the spiritual nature of the mind.” The key question here is how do we expect to test for consciousness? If it shows up somewhere after we learn enough about the brain, cool! But what would that even look like? It may most likely never show up. And despite perfect understanding of everything we still won’t know what it is. At that point, I can only see two remaining explanations… 1. It’s magic (aka spiritual aka “this doesn’t have an explanation, trut me bro”) or 2. Consciousness is experience itself (or reaction to stimuli) and was always there.

I buy into the second because it has more explanatory power, while also providing a cohesive understanding of why things even react to stimuli. The other explanation does not.

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So, if all things are conscious, why would our bodies seem to be related to numerically one mind, whereas half of my body and half of another person’s standing next to me do not constitute a single mind? Or why would a room full of people, or a football team, or a corporation or country not be conscious?

It seems to me that many of the issues that emergentism struggles with, notably psycho-physical harmony, composition, and psychological unity, are not obviously resolved by panpsychism, but just get relocated.

On the other hand, that emergentism is flawed is not itself an argument in favor of panpsychism, right? It’s not like these are our only options. Indeed, since both tend to be based on shared assumptions about ontology, composition, and causality, and both face similar hurdles, we might instead think that these assumptions are the real issues.

One thing to note here is that, while materialism (and later physicalism) had many fathers, and is itself not a monolith, a core concern from the begining was separating the mental from the physical, the value-laden and thought-like from the mechanistic, the spiritual from the secular, the human from the natural, the subjective from the objective (often as a sort of implicit ontological dualism even), etc. So it should hardly be surprising that, given assumptions born out of such a tradition, it is hard to bring the various cleavages back together.

Still, I also think it can be difficult to pinpoint exactly where problems arise when you move upstream enough. Consider assumptions about composition. Man is “made of” flesh and blood and these are “made of” molecules, etc. At each layer, we seem to have a substance that is both composed (except for perhaps some fundamental substrate) and its own subsistent causal entity. This suggests that each level up, the powers of each must be “in” the substrate from the begining (e.g., everything “being conscious”), at least as some sort of potential (e.g., the potential for spontaneous emergence). But this is hardly the only way composition and wholeness has or can be viewed, and I think that’s often a good place to start. Further upstream, assumptions about the univocity of being and cosmic homogeneity, and the nature of causality tend to shape theories of composition, but the influence here is certainly circular, since these theories of composition themselves seem to indicate a particular view of causality.

When it comes to appetite/desire, of intentionality, univocity comes to the fore because it would seem to make this an issue of “more or less” from some bottom state, and whether this fundamental state starts with the electron, the protein, the bacterium, or the neuron, doesn’t seem to make the problem any different. We still will have difficulty explaining the human mind’s unity.

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This is a good question. The thing is, you are your brain. You aren’t your heart. The thing typing and talking on this forum is not your heart, and so you aren’t experiencing what it is like to be your heart or any other thing in your body besides your brain.

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I think it’s the DNA. Our DNA is in all our cells. It’s what builds all our cells. All our cells, and all the structures our cells form, work together as a unit, following the instructions encoded in DNA. Our brains are part of that unit, responsible for so much of the background operations and maintenance.

Why would our bodies not be related to numerically one mind?