Panpsychism & the Nature of Consciousness - Philip Goff

What is consciousness? Why does it even exist? It has long been treated as the byproduct of biological complexity. The more complicated the brain, the more self-aware. Other thinkers have seen consciousness as totally distinct from the body — dualism. But maybe consciousness, like space and time, mass and energy, is just a basic characteristic of the universe. Maybe it's a fundamental property of matter. Welcome to the concept of "panpsychism". It's a radical-sounding idea and it could prove vital for us in radically rethinking how we think about reality itself. It's been said that the only thing we know for certain is our own experience. But how do we account for this most subjective phenomenon within the science of consciousness? How can science with its objective metrics even begin to engage with the felt nature of the inner subjective life?

#Philosophy #Consciousness

[yifuxero]

The entire universe is Pure Consciousness "In-Itself" (The Ground of Being, or Shankara's Sat-Chit-Ananda). However, just thinking about it won't get you there. One must transcend thought and experience the state of Samadhi (Satori). There are many techniques for doing this going back over 2, 000 years. One is the mantra method. Access "Mahamritunjaya mantra - Sacred Sounds Choir" and listen to it for 5 min per day for at least two weeks. If you haven't experience IT before, you will. And brains do NOT produce Pure Consciousness. The brain monitors the experience.

[philosophyofvalue]

Panpsychism is wrong because essential properties of consciousness like cognition, sentience and others I would like to list are not found in the physical world. I take panpsychism instead as an indication of the gross neglect and obfuscation of consciousness. For more, see my podcasts on youtube. Derek Mazzone

[RayStraiter]

I'm much more open to alternatives to physical-ism since I became aware of the long hidden problems of Dark Matter and Dark Energy. And, I like the fact that ideas like these tend piss off the fundamentalists.

[francisletterford]

I smoke weed and listen to philosophy programs such as these

[simonmasters]

Rather than "what it feels like to be something" as a definition, why not describe consciousness as "a means of communicating present experience to my future self" i.e. define its rationale or raisin d'etre. Consciousness can then easily be explained as evolutionarily adaptive.

[projectmalus]

Consciousness as a multiplicity of the One from the viewpoint of the multiplicity; enhanced awareness with the enhanced part trivial, since this is just filler in order to balance relations. The filler gained as adding points or objects of value with short curved motion segments, leading to the non-trivial part which is the expansion/contraction of understanding aka riding the one.

[dohduhdah]

It seems more plausible to account for the lack of scientific progress on the nature of consciousness because we lack the technology to study consciousness empirically (like brainscanners that reveal what goes on in the brain as we engage in mental activity at sufficient levels of detail).
But if we just look at consciousness from a behavioral point of view, it has already been solved. We have computers that are conscious and this is revealed from the way they are able to learn to play games like go, starting from scratch (the rules of the game). They are able to master the skill of playing go way beyond human levels and clearly demonstrate they have a level of awareness what's going on in the game (like what's at stake and which decisions they should make in order to win the game). The fact that these AI neural networks lack the language skills to reflect on their consciousness is irrelevant.
But you might wonder why there are no experiments that allow for a population of AI systems to evolve and develop language from scratch (combining genetic algorithms and neural networks), so the AI systems are not just able to learn from their own experience but also from the experience of their peers by having the ability to communicate.
Human intelligence/consciousness is a matter of a huge population of individuals collectively accumulating knowledge over many generations. In that respect the comparison between the human brain and AI systems is rather silly, because there has not been a huge population of AI systems that has been given the opportunity to accumulate knowledge collectively over prolonged periods.