Yes, indeed. And all of that means that the meanings — however approximate or vague — we assign to words need to be agreed, if the words are to achieve what you describe: communication.
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N.B. I’m only enjoying the playful aspect of these words, not criticising or trivialising them.
A lot of years ago, when “Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance” was published, Pirsig astonished me with some of his differing perspectives. For instance, saying “B values precondition A” instead of “A causes B”.
I think the same thing could be applied here, couldn’t it? Perspective is perhaps the most powerful mental tool I have ever come across. The more different views we have, the more different ways of viewing the same thing, the wider (and deeper?) our overall view, and maybe the understanding that emerges from it.
The key realisation, for me, is when an unlikely-sounding view turns out to be plausible, and valid in that sense. It doesn’t matter that it isn’t true in any particular instance, but only that, in general, it could offer a valid explanation.
I don’t really know what you mean but I’m intrigued.
Objects are in part conscious, but not in full. It can be said objects are dormant-consciousness or post-conscious-waste.
It is tricky isn’t it? 
I would say that sensing comes with a package, and that package is reaction. Now a reaction always goes two ways. A boulder is already too complex to be the best example I could use, and gravity is hard to compare to a boulder. Bear with me. What I mean is that two particles typically interact with each other, meaning they both react to something, that something being each other. Elementarily speaking, I think any phenomena, starting with gravity, is a result of this kind of micro interactions happening many many times. If we were to have a micro example of a particle or small enough thing that remains completely unphased despite another thing reacting to it, then my idea would be under serious jeopardy. But I can’t imagine that somehow.
So if we suppose that sensing comes with a reaction, then a reaction is indicative that the object of interest in sensing (meaning it takes in data about the world somehow). And that is what I would call consciousness at a baseline. Being able to take in data about reality, which I would argue everything does to some extent.
It’s easy for anyone to think that this is removed from consciousness because it should appeal to something like self-awareness, but in my view self-awareness is just an extremely more complex version of what I just described above.
If I had to summarize: Things experience exactly what is happening to them. Nothing more. Nothing less. So who knows what a rock feels like? But under this view, surely it feels something. And maybe that’s all consciousness is.
What would be your approach?
WOW, this is actually an interesting way to look at it… It makes me feel things have already a pre-determined way in which they will react if the right conditions show up. So the causal factor isn’t so much what is determining its impact, but rather the consequence was always waiting for the right context kinda thing…
Isn’t it fascinating? 
Yes, it is. It’s what keeps me doing philosophy. 
Yes, but the point is that something I thought was fixed — cause and effect — I discovered a new way of looking at it that evoked quite different reactions from me. It seems there’s (nearly) always a different way of seeing what you’re looking at. And that way could be interesting or useful, if you can just discover it in the first place. 
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Reading this I’m wondering: Do you think a consciousness is some sort of telos? Something that guides such a system along it’s path? If “striving for continued existance” of disparate parts is what is important than is “aging” (disintegration) necessarily experienced as failure of said telos. Things find it harder to be what they are?
For example, when you’re asking @Jkem33 whether the ice senses heat, why do think of ice as the information-processing unit and heat as the input? What if heat is a form of information processing to begin with? Output: Less movement here (ice), more movement there (air), trajectory → movement exchange (water/air) - keep for a while. Content until bored. Shift movment patterns around.
Is the distance between two individual organisms comparable to the distance between “elementary particles”? Is it all input-output relations? Where does consciousness come in?
How do you account for scale? Imagine a galaxy-scale consciousness. Would we even rate as conceivalbe (even though we’d be part of the internal input and would eventually be experiencable in aggregate stable outputs)? A galaxy might experience the history of societies in a way very, very loosely in analogue to the decay of an atom?
It’s a very weird way of thinking. But if consciousness is elementary, how does it scale? Does it really matter what we can conceive of as a unit?
Or differently put: why can’t I interpret “natural laws” as evidence for some form of universal information processing?
Maybe universes reproduce and we can’t see that on account of it being scaled out too far? Maybe there’s no limit.
I’m quite aware I’m reaching. But I must do this to contextualise consciousness outside of what I know (mine). If we abstract to the extent that we take out identity and feeling out of consciousness, what are we left with? We’re huge for an electron and tiny for a galaxy, and our processing is geared to very small range, with those outer limits not really even being tangental to our dailies. More and more, abstraction becomes a necessity. But abstraction never stops…
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I think it would be you getting a body transplant if they put your brain into my body. (I’m 62, btw, so you decide whether or not you want it.)
No, I don’t. Not consciousness alone. An electron is conscious. But an electron does not have any mental abilities, so it cannot have any goal towards which it works or guides.
The human has sensory organs, the ability to move and affect things, and many information processing systems and feedback loops. Without consciousness, we would be automatons. But we have consciousness, so all of that is subjectively experienced by us. And the complexity of our mental processes means part of that experience is the understanding of future, the capacity to want things that do not exist, and the ability to work toward the realization of those things.
Actually, I hadn’t been thinking of any of it as information processing. But I can see what you’re getting at. And maybe there are information processing systems combining? Whether or not ice is present, maybe heat is part of an information processing system. Add the ice, and you have a processing system enveloping another?
I believe physicists say the distance between an electron and the nucleus is analogous to the highest seats in a sports stadium from the center of the field.
I don’t know what you mean.
my guess is that it is everywhere. In every particle.
I guess that’s possible, according to my position. If information is processed over a span of 100,000 years, and distances of 100,000 lightyears, I guess it’s still information processing. Which is what I think makes for a unified consciousness.
I doubt any kind of thinking, though, though, if one part of the “brain” doesn’t know what’s up with other parts for that kind of timespan.
Could be. Meaning it wouldn’t even notice?
I don’t know. in one sense, no. Everything is conscious. Does it matter if the particles of a chair are all conscious, but the chair is not, compared to if the chair, as a unit, is conscious? The more important part is what is it conscious of.
Panpsychism, the notion that consciousness is a fundamental property of matter, has become a fairly popular view among scientists1 who seriously investigate the mysterious “emergence” of Mind in a Material world. It seems more scientific than Pantheism, because it makes no reference to thinking deities. But, it leaves the ultimate source, and evolutionary path, of Meaningful Information open to question.
For the pragmatic purposes of modern physics, the mindless metaphysical belief system of Materialism served adequately, until the 20th century. But for the 21st century, with the emergence of Artificial Intelligence, my personal philosophical worldview had to go beyond the superficial sensations of matter. It is peripherally related to Panpsychism, yet based on something more fundamental than human consciousness, which “emerged” only after 14B years of cosmic re-arrangements of atomic or subatomic particles.
This is my amateur assessment, drawn mostly from a layman’s understanding of Quantum Science and Information Theory, and also from non-professional argumentation on the Philosophy Forum. Instead of atoms of awareness, the essential element of the Cosmos seems to be Causation : (e.g. Energy, the power to transform). It’s what changed a “heap” of particles into an ongoing organized Process (e.g. solar system), then a living Organism (animation), and eventually a thinking Being (philosophers). But this kind of Energy is not the 19th century notion of a flowing substance. Instead, it’s more of a mutual relationship like Gravity.
As an alternative to Materialism (dumb particles), and Panpsychism (smart particles), Enformationism is based on the Process of Transformation that began with a Bang of Cosmic Causal Energy. But, instead of fizzling-out like 4th of July fireworks, it gradually transformed from Particle Soup to gravitational Galaxies, to planetary Systems, to postulating Philosophers, as-if directed toward some future state of organization, and as-if following a Program of Information like a computer. Remember, Form refers to non-random meaningful Patterns & Structures. And Trans-Form-ation means a progressive Change of Form as occurs in physical & biological evolution.
I began by extending Shannon’s engineering definition of Information to a more fundamental physical understanding of the general Power-to-Transform, that we know in physics as Energy. Today, Information as Ideas, and Information as Data, are now equated with general Causation as Energy2. After that initial insight, I came across A.N. Whitehead’s Process Theory3. And the result is, as you said, “experimental” philosophy, for which I coined the term EnFormAction4. and labelled the theory as Enformationism. It’s sort of like Information + Causation = Evolution of Matter into Mind [M = IC2] . 
1. Christof Koch: A prominent neuroscientist and Chief Scientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. He has advocated for panpsychist views linked to Integrated Information Theory (IIT), suggesting that any complex, integrated system possesses some level of consciousness. . . .
Stuart Hameroff: An anesthesiologist and director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona. While his specific theory, Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR), focuses on quantum processes in brain microtubules, it shares panpsychism’s premise that consciousness is woven into the foundational fabric of the universe.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=panpsychism+scientists
2. Energy and information are deeply linked, though in mainstream physics, they remain distinct. Energy is the capacity to do work, while information describes the arrangement and order of matter/energy.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=Energy+is+a+form+of+information.
3. In the context of process philosophy, panpsychism—often specifically called panexperientialism—posits that the fundamental building blocks of the universe are not inert matter, but momentary “drops of experience”. Rather than consciousness emerging mysteriously from dead matter, matter is viewed as the external, observable aspect of these basic units of experience.
Pioneered by mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, process philosophy abandons the idea of static “substances” (like hard, dead atoms). Instead, it understands the world as an ongoing process of becoming.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=process+philosophy+panpsychism
4. EnFormAction :
That neologism is an analysis and re-synthesis of the common word for the latent power of mental contents : “Information”. “En” stands for energy, the physical power to cause change; “Form” refers to Platonic patterns that become real things; “Action” is the meta-physical power of transformation, as exemplified in the amazing metamorphoses of physics, whereby one kind of thing becomes a new kind of thing, with novel properties.
https://bothandblog3.enformationism.info/page23.html
Actually, the distance-comparison wasn’t so much what I was after. I phrased that poorly. I meant to say if electrons, protons and neutrons form an atom, it’s by relation, right? Because they behave in predictable ways to each other.
That’s true, too, to some degree for humans (think queing, or how to behave in densly packed trains, or even where cars go in traffic).
I’m asking if, in terms of information processing, we can postulate similar systems for humans-as-particle. In my thinking, we’d have to scale upwards to account for our distance to the – daily-life-wise inaccessible – atoms. I’m not sure I know how. Thus the question.
Do human bodies form movements in aggregate that – at the appropriate scale – look more regular than the look up close, and thus look like they “process information”, maybe something hidden from us because of our attention structure. (Kinda like Earth-as-Supercomputer from the Hitchhiker’s Guide. I guess the answer to all that is 42?)
If information processing is a basic requirement for consciousness, there’s information to process (input), the processing (a formula, a black box, whatever), and some form of output (that likely is input for something else, or for the same process again - if iterative).
There are theories out there that say when information processing is just that, and when it’s… conscious? (I’m sure someone mentioned IIT; they calculate Phi, if I’m not mistaken. I’m not smart enough to understand their reasoning easily, and I don’t have the time for a deep dive. I think the calculations show when the whole is more than the sum of its parts? Better ask an expert.)
To be honest, I’m not quite sure myself what I mean.
Sort of. But it’d feed into something it would notice. It would be there in aggregate. Sort of when I look at my hand: I don’t see a single atom of those that make it up, and at the same time I see quite a lot of them. There’s a meaning-confusion here somewhere; but is this a thought-problem? A galaxy-scale consciousness that doesn’t think might not make the difference.
That’s sort of the problem I have with accepting panpsychism: by the time I arrive at it, I no longer know what I’m talking about. I just end up confused. What is consciousness, if most of the things I think of as such are optional? What remains as elementary? What do I need the term for?
I think this is true of human populations, and probably populations of any species. We can probably predict what percentage of people will do X in certain circumstances. I think it’s kind of like quantum stuff, actually. Maybe half-life? We can’t predict which specific human will do X, just as we can’t predict which specific particle will decay. But we know the general number that will in a particular amount of time.
Not if my position is correct. Consciousness is always there, in everything. But I think information processing is required to make a bunch of particles consciousness as a unit, rather than only a bunch of individually conscious particles. There is no information processing going on in my dining room table. So that’s just a bunch of individually conscious particles. Their physical connection does not make them conscious as a unit.
But I could be wrong. Maybe all of the particles are conscious and the table is a conscious unit. Just as all the particles that make up me are conscious and I am a conscious unit. In the case of the table, I don’t think it makes a difference. If it’s a conscious unit, it’s not capable of perception, desire, emotion, or intent, much less action.
I think IIT says the information, or its processing, is consciousness. I don’t think so. I think the subjective experience of information processing unifies the consciousness of the particles that make up the components of the information processing system. But the consciousness was there, in all the particles, from the beginning.
I know the feeling. 
I think we need it because we need an explanation for what is going on. For our subjective experience, qualia, self-awareness. Nobody can explain how physical properties and processes account for such things, and, as people like Donald Hoffman and David Eagleman (and, amusingly, an apparently AI version of Susskind) have said, science doesn’t even know how to ask the question.
As for what it is, my thinking is that it is the capacity to subjectively experience. Everything subjectively experiences its own existence. In the case of humans, our existence is a whole bunch of information processing systems and feedback loops. The physical structures and events that make up those systems and loops do not describe, or even suggest, qualia, self-awareness, or anything else typically considered to be aspects of consciousness. I’m saying those things are the result of consciousness subjectively experiencing the processing and looping.
Consciousness seems like a difficult “property” to define. If I am someone with visual capacity, then seeing the world around me seems to be part of consciousness. But a blind person can still be conscious. They do, after all, have their other human senses and an ability to perform “internal” thought. If a person lacks function in all sensory systems, for instance if they are a brain in a vat, then sensation seems to be simulated by CNS signals alone, even without an external input.
I believe myself to be conscious because I am having at least some sensation of the world. When I am asleep and dreaming, we might say I’m unconscious, though I am simulating sensation through neural activity in my brain.
I’m not exactly sure what it means for elementary particles to be aware. I’ve been unconscious before, and so have you: in the time between waking consciousness and REM sleep, or if you’ve been under anaesthetic. A lot of that time will seem to have never been experienced. But you never stopped being composed of electrons and protons, so why wasn’t there an experience during that period if your physical substance still carried awareness?
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It was said in a previous comment that a tree has a different kind of consciousness than a person. I think this highlights how conciousness is not actually a single phenomenon, but rather a collective term for multiple phenomenon which create a similar effect.
A statue made of wood and a statue made of stone are very different in their material essence, but both are considered statues. Similarly, a being that can see but not hear is aware of its existence as much as a being that can hear but not see.
A dead body reacts to the universe by being decomposed, and going back to the particles it was made from. Does it mean a dead body is conscious?
I think panpsychism is true. I’m especially partial to electron consciousness; after all brains are bioelectrical organs (re action potential). However there seems to be some difference between an electron and human consciousness, as our consciousness consists of, let’s just say, a gang of electrons moving along the many-pathed brain circuitry. Compare that to an electron, alone and in orbit around the nucleus.
There was experience just no memory, or self-reflection because those parts of your brain that work as systems to create more complex thought were shut down.
yeah of course, just not in the same sense as a live one.
Yeah, for sure! This post is simply treeing to explain what the connecting piece is between all the different kinds of conciousness.
Isn’t being conscious being able to feel the pain and pleasure, interact with others linguistically, working for one’s own wellbeing and survival?