A Novel Argument Against Panpsychism

Sorry, I meant to say that Panpsychism has been DEBUNKED by my LOGIC and CONVINCINGNESS.

[EmersonGreen]

Here's a hypothesis: Most conscious beings who have ever existed have not seen this video. But wait -- there is spectacular evidence against this hypothesis: You have seen this video.

[Ricocossa]

I haven't finished the video yet, but I think you're trying a sort of anthropic argument to disprove panpsychism. That's misunderstanding panpsychiam. We're not saying elementary particles have the capacity to observe reality. Just that they're endowed with consciousness, in the sense of the so-called hard problem of consciousness. The anthropic argument works in cases where, as an observer of reality, you'd be more likely to be such and such. Of course you're more likely to be an elementary particle, but then you wouldn't even be able to formulate the thought that you are a particle.

[randomblueguy]

I am not a panpsychist and I do think this argument (and other similar arguments) fail. What you’re doing is focusing on one specific class of observers and comparing it to the whole population, which will always give you a low prior regardless of what you started with. Think of the probability of you being born *you* rather than someone else. That’s roughly 1 in a 100 billion. That that probability is low should not count as evidence for solipsism.

[noahbodycares]

I don’t see how this prediction failing means that panpsychism is less likely true. It’s astonishingly unlikely that I would be born with exactly the dna, mental disorders, and personality I have and yet I AM born.

Unlikely events occur all the time.

[Nickesponja]

Doesn't this argument work as well for the property of being a particle? There are more particles than humans, so you should expect to be a particle instead of a human. Hence, the view that particles exist is highly improbable.

[Finfie]

I think this video made me finally understand the problem of credences, at least the way you are using them. Essentially, your selection criteria isn't plausibillity, but self-centeredness. The more a worldview puts your own experience in the center, the more you are in a mayority position, the higher your credence. On the contrary the more you are a "special case", an outlier or simply in the minority, the lower your credence in that particular worldview. This isn't a particularly good way to come to a true conclusion in my opinion. A better way might be to look at something i will call "global credence", which would be the normalized sum of all projected credences over all entities. That way you do not favor a worldview just because it puts you in the center.

[photon]

I feel like this attitude would mean that Solipsism beats all other models on prior probability of me having my experience, because with Solipsism it is 1.

[whatsinaname]

The prior probability of Paris being in France is vanishingly low, therefore Paris is not in France

[zzycatch]

There seem to be many problems with this. First and foremost, organisms are not comprised of a static set of particles. If I'm not comprised of static components, than my consciousness doesn't have a one to one relationship with me, even it you consider my lifetime of consciousness monolithic.

So me and my consciousness are really complex systems, derived from the interplay of innumerable sets that make up me and my consciousness in any given moment.

In fact, you could most likely swap any random particle in me at any moment for any other random particle and the concepts of me and my consciousness would be unaffected.

Does every particle then have a consciousness that connects into mine? Or does every particle merely have the potential to be part of a consciousness? Is this a meaningful distinction?

Are any of these sets meaningful distinctions?

[Camilo-nesx]

I don't understand your argument, the statement "you have a vanishingly low probability of coming to exist as a human" means just that. It doesn't mean "you cant be a human".
Also the whole argument assumes that everyone kindof "exist before existing" and we have to roll a huge dice that will decide which form we'll take. If instead it turns out we just start existing as ourselves then the probability of anyone being anyone else is exaclty 0 because you started existing already as yourself so there was no point at which "who you are" was in doubt.

[ArabesqueAway]

Its not clear how Panpsychsim has made a failed prediction here. For any given experience on Panpsychsim, its only more likely by relative frequency for that experience to be of a minimal form.

As long as Panpsychism predicts some relative frequency of (complex experiences/simple particle experiences) and that frequency obtains, then, if anything, Panpsychism has made a correct prediction.

The fact that my individual conscious experience is unlikely by relative frequency just seems irrelevant as Panpsychism may just predict that frequency.

[onion]

Yes, but since there are more particles than organisms, Panpsychism makes the right prediction almost all the time.

[JarmoPetersson]

I don't get it.

1. This argument seems to assume that a particles experience is anywhere near the human experience

2. This argument seems to disprove anything that is very unlikely, like experiencing certain things or living at all

It also feels like the argument sees N different objects in the world, while a panpsychist might say that there is an experience to be 1 particle, 2 particles, 3 particles, ..., 10E80 particles. And then what you are saying is that you should feel like 1 particle, not 10E80, whixh definitely changes the maths.

[ryder]

Apologetics, while I do enjoy the concept behind the argument here, I think that it is based on faulty logic.
The panpsychist view does not generally take the conscious experience of each conscious thing (particles potentially included) to be even remotely similar, and there is no saying that a given consciousness simply 'takes the form of' an entity.

It may well be (and seems not only more likely but more convincing) that the conscious experience as described by a panpsychist model is created with/by the associated physical thing. In this way, the 'me' that is not a particle never could have been a particle, nor could I have been any other human being, animal, or organised system. The argument here requires a very specific metaphysics to function, (that consciousnesses exist before they are associated with a physical entity) which is one that is not remotely held in common panpsychist thought.

With this in mind, the argument, while statistically pleasing, fails to actually address panpsychism.

[bvabildtrup]

This doesn't make any sense. There's also a tiny chance of me being born, yet I was born. The chances of something being an organism is super tiny, so what? guess that's why there's more particles than organisms. Whether they are conscious or not seems to be beside the point.

[melchiortod]

Never build an argument around statistics. Like it doesn't hold at all. Assuming the distributions conciousness to object is i.i.d then the probability of being one specific particle would be equally as probable than being a specific organism. Just statistically you'd be more of a particle, but it'd still be 1/total population what you ended upon. And even if 10^-30 % of a population are a type, 10^-30% of the population have to be that type no matter how unlikely, because if they weren't the probability would be 0 and not 10^-30%. I think the whole panpsychism is dumb don't get me wrong, but you're missing a few things. Like for example you can't interact with the particles conciousness, so wheter it exists or not is not relevant to your subjective experience as an organism. So if you were a concious particle, you wouldn't have the means to communicate that. Maybe my point gets clearer if i make an analogy. So all the physical constants seem to be fine tuned because if they were slightly different, the universe wouldn't exist in the way we percieve it. Some people take this as an argument for creation. But the argument is flawed because it's not what are the chances of the constants being so perfect, it's that in all the other places(whatever that means) where they aren't "perfect", we couldn't be there to experience it. So just because it's unprobable it doesn't say anything about the situation, since if the other situation were you wouldn't be able to judge it from your current point of view.
Also an arrow hitting a target. What are the chances? They're allways zero since there are infinitely many places on the target where the arrow could land. Yet the arrow allways lands somewhere. So 1/ infinitly many places=0 but it still hits. Low probability is never an argument

[brandonsmith]

There might be another way to consider this.

Let's imagine consciousness as being something like sunlight. When the sun is shining, it's shining everywhere all at once.

Take the view of a mountain. Sunlight is shining on that mountain. It is also shining on a particular tree on that mountain. It is also shining on a particular branch on that tree. The fact that the entire mountain is illuminated is nothing other than the fact that individual leaves, branches, trees, stones, foot-paths, rivers, waterfalls, boulders, and the like, are illuminated.

Many structures arise in, are illuminated by, sunlight. Many structures arise in, or are illumined by, consciousness. Thoughts, feelings, perceptions, concepts, are not raw awareness, they are psychological structures, comparable to the physical structures associated with the mountain. There is not "Mountain sunlight" and "tree-branch sunlight", there is only sunlight permeating all scales of the scene. Not "human awareness" or "cell awareness", only awareness at all scales. Nor is the "self" "aware" any more than the mountain produces sunlight, rather the self is a structure that arises within and is illumined by awareness, as the mountain is a structure that exists in and is illuminated by sunlight.

You could say "trees should not exist, a tree is composed of billions of cells, statistically cells should exist but there should never be a tree". Could say "Cells should not exist, a single cell is composed of innumerable atoms, the likelihood of atoms existing is great, but of cells, almost unreasonably small", or you could say "structure exists at all scale, a large structure being parsed down to smaller structure being parsed down to smaller structure, a large structure itself a parasol of a greater structure which is a parasol of a greater structure. Structure exists invariant of scale, awareness permeates or shines upon the whole things, a perfectly smooth (non-quantized) continua"

[heresa_notion_]

If I understand the reason panpsychism is a thing, it's only as a (I'm not sure which) for people who absolutely postulate the impossibility of getting conscious things from strictly physical things. So if you've refuted panpsychism (though Emerson Green's reductio does work for me), all you've done is raised the a posteriori probability of the counter postulate -- conscious things can arise out of strictly physical things. As a physicalist I'm fine with that, although the reason I would refute a particle being (proto) conscious is not statistical, it's that particles (simply) lack a needed organization or architecture that (is hypothesized to) make physical things entail consciousness.

[LBoomsky]

I don't think this works, cuz what if you WERE a particle?
if you exist from the position of a particle, panpsychism will remain rational yet this argument still stands because of the existence of also organisms being conscious.
I could do the same thing to suggest that organisms with less brain complexity than a human cannot have souls because of the pure chance of not having that.

[nathanketsdever]

The easier argument seems to be: what is the evidence that tables or rocks have consciousness?

I'm curious if panpsychism only makes sense if you have a complex, robust understanding of consciousness. Clarifying what consciousness is in this case is critical to understand it and it's implications. Just saying consciousness is awareness (presumably sensing or feeling) seems a very low level. In what sense do tables and rocks have this capability and how do we know? What's the evidence?

I guess at least panpsychics realize we don't like in a material-only universe.