Complex Numbers

Universal Consciousness

Today in "Just Because You Can Think It Doesn't Mean It's True..."

(Buckle up, folks, this one's a bit complicated.)

https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2020/01/17/panpsychism-an-interview-and...

Panpsychism: an interview and a critique

"Panpsychism" is, as I understand it, the philosophical position that consciousness exists because everything is conscious.

Is that the whiff of bovine excrement my nose detects?

Harris gives the same two justifications for panpsychism as does Philip Goff in the interview below: there is no way to understand how subjective perception (“qualia”) can arise from purely materialistic phenomena in the brain (this is the “hard problem of consciousness”, and, second, because science cannot tell us what the real intrinsic nature of matter is. Supposedly philosophy can, and that intrinsic nature includes consciousness. How philosophy alone can supply this conclusion baffles me.

Now, I don't think it's a bad thing to come up with ideas like this. All great discoveries start out with an idea. But most ideas don't lead to great discoveries. But where's the supporting evidence? Hint: lack of evidence isn't supporting evidence. Worse, it can't be disproved.

It's like the pernicious idea that we're living in a simulation, like in The Matrix. I maintain that a well-designed simulation wouldn't give us the leeway to conceive of this possibility; therefore, if we are living in a simulation, it's not a well-designed one. If it's not a well-designed one, we should see cracks in it ("glitches in the matrix"). We don't, at least not compelling ones. Therefore, we're not living in a simulation. But that's not disproof; that's just my personal argument against it.

Besides, even if we were, we can't get out of it, so what bloody difference does it make?

From a quoted section of text:

But when I use the word consciousness, I simply mean experience: pleasure, pain, visual or auditory experience, et cetera.

If you simply mean experience, then say experience.

Assertion:

The qualitative experience of consciousness cannot be understood by a program of scientific materialism.

Any actual proof of that, or are you just declaring it to be so?

No need to quote much else, I think. The link is worth a read if you like to think about thinking.

I used to hang out with people who would say things like, "The Universe loves you and wants to keep you alive." This is demonstrably untrue; as far as we know, we can stay alive in a shell, proportionally thinner than an eggshell, surrounding the Earth. Even some parts of this shell, like Antarctica for instance, aren't very hospitable and will kill you in hours. Everywhere else? Everywhere in the entire universe? Dead in less than a minute.

But the people saying this really believed it, because they wanted it to be true.

(I should acknowledge here that there very well might be other shells that can support our life processes. As I've noted before, it's a big universe. Still, the number of such places surely rounds off to zero when compared to the vast emptiness of space and the burning hearts of stars.)

But hey, the panpsychists very well might get the last laugh; they might turn out to be right after all. After all, the Universe has been known to throw us a few curveballs every now and then. But until we see some evidence, it remains just as much wishful thinking as the idea that the Universe is actively working to keep us alive.