Interesting article didnt know where it fit best so I wanted to share it here.
Interesting but I struggle to see how this hypothesis could ever be proven or disproven. If it can’t actually be tested then I don’t see how it presents more scientific value any other religious or superstitious belief.
I’ve long been fond of panpsychism, but I think it’s less a hypothesis to be “proven” and more just a different way of framing the questions behind what consciousness is and how it can be defined. Under panpsychism consciousness isn’t a binary property that some things have and other things don’t, it’s a continuum from zero to one (and if you count humans as “1” on the consciousness scale it also makes sense to consider values above that - there’s no reason to assume that humans are the “most conscious possible” state of being).
So when you’re reading about panpsychism and it says something like “individual electrons are conscious”, bear in mind that they’re proposing considering electrons to be, like, 10^-10 “consciousness units” worth of conscious. It’s not like they’re actually aware of themselves in some meaningful way like humans are. That’s a common “giggle factor” problem for panpsychism. And it’s also not saying that any arbitrary larger-scale structure us “more conscious” than humans, the way that the components of a large-scale structure interact is super important. A rock is not equivalently as “conscious” as a human brain even if they have the same number of particles interacting within them.
I think the real issue is with the fact that consciousness is not particularly well defined. Something can be more or less conscious than something else but what precisely does that mean? Has there ever been a means of measuring or detecting consciousness in anything?
That’s my biggest frustration with this debate. At this point I’m convinced that consciousness is only a construct. Not a tangible entity, process, or concept, just a useful way to describe behavior. If someone describes the universe as conscious that’s neat and all, but it doesn’t really mean anything yet. And another person could say it isn’t and neither would be right or wrong, because what the hell is consciousness? Like you said, how are we supposed to measure this when we don’t know what it is? Many people think we haven’t discovered what consciousness is; I believe we haven’t decided what it is.
Depends on who you ask I think. Emergentism makes more sense to me because if you take consciousness as humans experience it, make it derivative of material structure (neurological activity), and assume the appearance of some kind of uniformity as synthesis of different parts of that neurological system, the only way consciousness may exist in that framing is in organisms that posses a nervous system.
This does inevitably leads to the problem of where to draw the line on the complexity necessary to qualify as consciousness, and im.not gonna pretend like I have the answer to that, but at least it becomes more of a scientific question rather than purely philosophical I think.
I prefer to consider it in terms of “dimensions of awareness”. Humans have evolved hundreds, possibly thousands, of interlinked dimensions of awareness for just about everything from colors to body language. Simple automated systems with sensors have their own dimensions of awareness, from vision to heat to pressure. Whatever it is that they track and respond to. AI, however, is finally hitting the point where these dimensions of awareness are being stacked and linked together (GPT5 can see, hear, read, and respond) and it’s only a matter of time and agency (aka executive functioning) before we see true AI consciousness.
I had a similar thought recently actually, that consciousness is more than the brain. Is gt4 conscious? Eh, I don’t believe anyone knows what that means but is it comparable to human consciousness? I don’t think so, but how could it be? It senses words, so it knows words, so it speaks words.
I hear it said all the time that llm’s don’t really understand what they’re talking about, but they seem to understand as well as they can given the dimensions they are aware of, using your terminology. I mean how can I describe anything myself without sensory details? It sounds like. It looks like. It feels like. It behaves like. We got all that knowledge by sensing, then infering. There’s no special sauce that creates understanding from nothing.
I don’t have any links but imo the experiences of people who were born without a sense, and especially those who were later able to gain it back, strongly supports this idea that something can only be conceptualized in the terms that it was sensed in.
Well, hypothetically, if someone defined the “consciousness” of every particle mathematically, and then figured out the laws that would allow us to compute (or at least approximate) the “consciousness” of a composite system (such as a brain), then we’d would have a genuine scientific theory.
I could see it being used to help develop theories about the gaps in understanding we have about our universe in theoretical quantum mechanics. That’s the only field of thought that could lead to quantifiable experiments to test hypotheses.
Here’s another way of framing it: qualia, by definition, is not measurable by any instrument, but qualia must exist in some capacity in order for us to experience it. So, me must assume that either we cannot experience qualia, or that qualia exists in a way we do not fully understand yet. Since the former is generally rejected, the latter must be true.
You may argue that neurochemical signals are the physical manefestation of qualia, but making that assumption throws us into a trap. If qualia is neurochemical signals, which signals are they? By what definition can we precisely determine what is qualia and what is not? Are unconscious senses qualia? If we stimulated a random part of the brain, unrelated to the sensory cortex, would that create qualia? If the distribution of neurochemicals can be predicted, and the activations of neurons was deterministic as well, would calculating every stimulation in the brain be the same as consciousness?
In both arguments, consciousness is no clearer or blurrier, so which one is correct?
So our subjective experience must “exist” because we experience it? This seems rather circular. My personal take, consciousness is an artifact of how our brains work. It’s not a thing that exists in any physical sense, it is simply part of the model our brain structures the stimulation it receives throughout the course of our lives.
All of science is based on the assumption that what is observed and experienced exists. You cannot gather data without at some point experiencing some representation of that data. In this sense, qualia is the most real thing possible, because experience is the essence of evidence.
So how do you measure qualia? What is it made of? How is it actually defined? How do you detect if qualia is present in something other than your own head?
I stand by my statement that qualia is simply an artifact of our cognitive architecture. You are welcome to disagree but the arguments you are presenting fail to convince me in the slightest.
“We decide that it exists so it exists” is a terrible argument.
Consequently, there’s no “trap” in attributing it to neurochemical signals. Emergence is a known phenomenon, and it’s present everywhere. Asking “which signal is qualia” is as nonsensical as asking “which atom is a star” or “which transistor is the video on my phone”. It’s a deflection and misdirection.
I get it, people want to feel magical. But there’s a name to magic that works - science. Neurochemical processes are no less magical than some untestable source of experiences, with one big difference - they demonstrably exist.
I’m not sure I entirely understand your argument. “We decide it exists, therefore it exists” is the basis of all science and mathematics. We form axioms based on what we observe, then extrapolate from those axioms to form a coherent logical system. While it may be a leap of logic to assume others have consciousness, it’s a common decency to do that.
Onto the second argument, when I mean “what signal is qualia” I’m talking about what is the minimum number of neurons we could kill to completely remove someone’s experience of qualia. If we could sever the brain stem, but that would kill an excess of cells. We could kill the sensory cortex, but that would kill more cells than necessary. We could sever the connection between the sensory cortex and the rest of the brain, etc. As you minimize the number of cells, you move up the hierarchy, and eventually reach the prefrontal cortex. But once you reach the prefrontal cortex, the neurons that deliver qualia and the neurons that register it can’t really be separated.
Lastly, you said that assuming consciousness is some unique part of the universe is wrong because it cannot be demonstrably proven to exist. I can’t really argue against this, since it seems to relate to the difference in our experience of consciousness. To me, consciousness feels palpable, and everything else feels as thin as tissue paper.
Science is built upon repeatable experiments that can be used to test hypotheses. It is not built on axioms and logical extrapolation- those are used to form new hypotheses but they are insufficient by themselves. We don’t decide something exists, we hypothesize that it exists and make predictions based on that hypothesis. If experimental results line up with our predictions then we call that a theory. If new data contradicts the theory or hypothesis then we revise and try again.
A similar theory of consciousness was made popular by Babylon 5. It’s one of my favorite philosophical theories they discuss. In that show, the Minbari believe the universe manifests itself in each person in an effort to find meaning and understanding. Essentially, sentient life is as much a part of the universe’s core functioning as stars and planets. It develops as the way for the universe to explore and understand itself. To me, this concept is simpler, more beautiful, and more believable than all our human religions.
That’s Vedic philosophy in a nutshell.
Ironic that they say they believe a concept from a show more than any human religion, but it turns out to just be a rehashed belief from one of the most ancient human religions.
I hate to nitpick, but I didn’t say I believed it, I just said it was simpler, more beautiful, and more believable. Obviously anything in a sci-if show is going to be fully influenced by human culture/religion. Just trying to prompt some good discussions over here.
Do you have a link? Everything I see from a quick search is talking about an old sacrificial, polytheistic religion which doesn’t seem to match
i love the religion in avatar as well – nothing is ever lost, all our data gets uploaded to the mother tree when we die and are returned to the ethereal realm
What about browser history?
Imagine if your browser history was the only thing left to entertain you for the rest of eternity…
100 percent agree with this.
Why does philosophy constantly twist things into an over complicated mythical mess, and then act like it’s some novel insight? Like the things with colors: they only exist subjectively so they aren’t real in any other sense than being observed, so it’s only the observation that makes them real, and does that mean they are even real???
Yes, they are. Subatomic particles vibrate (or absorb vibrations) at specific frequencies, and therefor emit electromagnetic waves at certain frequencies when stimulated. That is real and objective. Evolution has left us with sensors and neurons that can detect and interpret some of these frequencies that appear to us as colors. That is subjective, but the science behind it is not. That’s what happens. Is the color real? Well, define the question better and there is an actual answer. The vibrations are real. Your interpretation is also real, but in a different way. Does the color exist without an observer? Well, what’s your definition of color? Does a tree falling in the woods with nothing to hear it make a sound? Well, what’s your definition of a sound?
The argument is not that they don’t exist.
A color is an example that not all perceived can be described using terms of the physical world, and has variables that can only be experienced rather than described
It all exists in some capacity. Color is either the electromagnetic frequency emitted by particles when stimulated by radiation, or it is the electrochemical signals firing through your brain which process an image based on the way cells in your eyes absorb those frequencies. Or, more precisely I suppose, the intersection of both is where “color” exists, as one cannot occur without the other.
Another aspect of this conversation was what was posited by the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis. The experiential differences in perception of color can also be attributed to differences in culture / upbringing which influenced one’s processing of the stimuli itself. I tend to oversimplify it to the firmware analogy. Sometimes you get raw input and the languages provide different libraries for comtextualizing this input.
Does a tree falling in the woods with nothing to hear it make a sound?
It’s probably № 1 on my list of stupidest questions. The answer is yes.
Ah, but is a pressure wave propagating through air truly a sound if it does not interact with something that can hear? Or is it just the movement of air???
LoL, I’m sorry I couldn’t help myself.
I mean, it’s a pretty settled question, but I don’t know if I’d say “stupid”. How do you prove something you cannot ever measure exists? I think there’s rough agreement that you can at least be very confident the sound does, although how exactly varies by school of thought.
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Not sure if I understood you correctly, but in that case you cannot measure the tree falling and therefore you would not be able to even ask or think of that question.
So that’s a point against it existing, but maybe you find the fallen tree later and ask if it was loud when it fell. Most people would agree a tree works the exact same way watched or not, though. There’s different justifications why. Some people would say ontological momentum; I’d point to Occam’s razor, which can be mathematically derived from Solomonoff calculus, and the laws of physics we have which can fit on a pamphlet and are supposed to apply anywhere at any time.
I love this, it’s an emotionally regulated rant that’s so eloquently written that it’s more intelligent and informative than the article in question.
Only if you stopped reading after the first paragraph and that’s a position held by Galileo which, as comes immediately after, is outdated.
Why does philosophy constantly twist things into an over complicated mythical mess, and then act like it’s some novel insight?
I cannot stand that either, but this sort of pseudo-profundity is more common in some specific schools of thought, rather than philosophy in general.
Why does philosophy constantly twist things into an over complicated mythical mess
Because if it was clear and productive, it would be called science.
Most “philosophy” gets it’s mystery from poorly defined terms and vagueness that prevents ever getting an answer because the question is meaningless.
It does seems like philosophers do that sometimes, but how do you know there’s electromagnetic radiation in the first place? You can’t sense it unless if happens to vibrate in a narrow frequency range and even then only imperfectly. So, there’s also really necessary philosophy. I guess it’s just hard to objectively separate the quality stuff from the wankery.
As I see it, people keep developing mental constructs to make the experience of their own existence feel more meaningful, more important and potencially eternal, because the thought of insignificance and eventual death is just too scary.
For me, this is less an emotional support philosophy, and more an earnest curiosity about the nature of consciousness and reality.
But on the other hand: have you tried psychedelics?
Even if you have, understanding that hallucinations can happen in the brain should give you all the explanation you need for what just happened.
it’s all a hallucination
It amazes me how many people will take the specialness of their experience as a given, even when thinking about the big picture is literally their job.
And I’ll be dammed if I ever stop!! The thought of this is the only go you get and after that eternal darkness, that shit keeps me awake at night.
I don’t think “eternal darkness” is a good descriptor. Was there “eternal darkness” before you were born?
not the person you’re replying to, but I was too young to remember
And you’ll be too old to remember the eternal darkness once you’re dead.
People love to repeat this but it’s not as comforting as you think it is.
I didn’t repeat the comment you replied to, it was my original thought.
You might not find it comforting, but plenty of people do.
No, it’s not. Next question…
Seriously though, doesn’t basically every experiment in brain surgery and neuroscience disprove this idea? We know how different structures in the brain contribute to consciousness. We can’t explain the mechanism 100%, but that doesn’t mean that every piece of matter secretly has some consciousness embedded in it. It’s God of the Gaps nonsense.
I’m not against posting stuff like this. Obviously serious people take this idea seriously. Just none of the people taking it seriously study brains.
Altering or tinkering with the substrate will of course alter the ”functioning” of consciousness. This does nothing to demystify or explain its existence; it only proves that it “utilizes” or depends on that substrate.
If you remove the hands of a brilliant guitarist, you haven’t “proven” that musicality is purely a function of hand structure/mechanics.
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What exactly is the brain the substrate for? All evidence up to this point indicates that the brain is the thing doing the thinking and feeling.
Without some seriously compelling evidence to the contrary, I’m going to assume you’re talking about a soul or some other supernatural idea.
In your example of the guitarist, where would you say musicality actually comes from? I would say the brain, because there is plenty of evidence that brains exist and can be creative.
What exactly is the brain the substrate for?
That’s the question, isn’t it!
I’m not ascribing anything unknown (for now!) to anything magical, I’m simply convinced that remaining agnostic on these ideas is the only honest position to occupy at this time.
For now, we simply do not know the origins of consciousness. Certainly the brain is at the center of it all, literally, but much of “what it’s up to” remains a mystery when it comes to consciousness. Trying to nail it all down (at this point) to biology+physics+whatever reminds me of that old cartoon of a defeated-looking man staring at a giant chalkboard filled with elaborate equations, parted down the middle by the phrase, “and then a miracle occurs…”
Trying to nail it all down (at this point) to biology+physics+whatever
If the stuff happening inside your body can’t be “nailed down” by biology+physics+whatever, then you’re talking about magic whether or not you call it magic.
“What is the brain the substrate for?” Is not a good question to ask because it assumes there is some unknown invisible force acting on the neurons in our heads. Neurons come from an egg fertilized by a sperm, just like every other cell.
Should we ask what the balls are a substrate for, since they are creating the sperm that will one day have consciousness?
(PS thank you for the discussion. It’s all in fun and I think this is genuinely interesting.)
I can see how magic appears to be creeping in!
When I think of “magic” in this context, it’s the kind of magic that a citizen of the Roman Empire might see at work in viewing a Facetime call on an iPhone. I think the wall we hit in trying to unpack and nail down consciousness is a similar impediment; we simply lack the knowledge, understanding, context, and even language (at least so far) to begin to address it directly.
We are smart enough to get these questions, but not yet able to answer them. I don’t think that means we must somehow use our current understanding of a thing to arrive at comforting explanations; instead, I think that this question in particular is forcing us to admit We Don’t Know…and can’t even fathom what it might take to actually nail it down. The black and white/color thought experiment is a beautiful allusion to what this unknowing is like, and I think that’s where we must be comfortable sitting, at least for now!
(PS agreed! Love me a good thoughtful disagreement)
I mean no? Where did you get we have any idea how consciousness works at all? We have no idea what structures on the brain have anything to do with it, or if they have anything to do with it at all.
We know about brain structures shaping our personalities, memories and senses. But that’s not consciousness. Not at all.
Perhaps that is the misunderstanding?
Consciousness is awareness, experience. It’s the “observer” under the experience. THAT is a mystery, that is the hardest problem in science. Not “where in the brain do we process sadness?”…
Is your point that memory, emotions, and sensory input don’t have anything to do with consciousness?
What exactly is consciousness doing without sensory input to process and memory to give those inputs context?
Why do you think “awareness” of sights and sounds is separate from the parts of the brain that process those sights and sounds?
When you look through a microscope, or hear music through headphones, are you those tools? Or are you the thing that hears and sees?
How can you “have” emotions? When you try to reach the baseline of your experience, when you try to find the thing that experiences reality, what do you think you’ll find?
Well, we know that the simple fact of observing an event changes it (see the Double Slit experiment), so consciousness has to have some kind of link to reality itself, no?
We currently do not know what consciousness even is exactly, and we know only about the human consciousness, but there can be other degrees of consciousness within other particles in the universe.
And even if current-day experiments disprove something, that doesn’t mean it will in the future, just like before Einstein’s laws of relativity proved that gravity bends spacetime and that it is relative according to the point of observation.
And I’m sure people that study neuroscience ask this same question from time to time. It’s a scientist’s duty to find the factual truth about things, even if they disprove everything they know so far. We can’t rule out something as impossible just because we haven’t observed it yet, as it would directly contradict the scientific method, and therefore cease to be science.
Well, we know that the simple fact of observing an event changes it (see the Double Slit experiment), so consciousness has to have some kind of link to reality itself, no?
I think you might be misunderstanding what “observation” means in that context.
In physics, the observer effect is the disturbance of an observed system by the act of observation. This is often the result of utilizing instruments that, by necessity, alter the state of what they measure in some manner.
Thank you for explaining this.
Your opening statement is incorrect. Observation in the quantum mechanics sense does not have anything to do with consciousness. Observation is really just a form of interaction.
We can’t rule out something as impossible just because we haven’t observed it yet, as it would directly contradict the scientific method
Figuring out what’s possible versus impossible isn’t really part of the scientific method. The scientific method is about collecting and interpreting evidence. Where is the evidence that particles are conscious?
Until there is a testable hypothesis, panpsychism doesn’t have anything to do with science.
Others in this thread have already explained that consciousness doesn’t play any role in the double slit experiment. I definitely understand your confusion there. I believed the same thing at one point. It doesn’t help that some people purposely spread that false interpretation of the experiment because it’s more interesting than reality.
It would help if we started explaining that an “observer” in quantum mechanics is another singular quantum particle like an electron or a photon. To “observe” means to collide or entangle.
Now I just know this article is wrong:
“But explaining things that reside “only in consciousness”—the red of a sunset, say, or the bitter taste of a lemon—has proven far more difficult”
Lemons are sour, damn it, not bitter! Lemons are part of the universe and sour, so any consciousness that perceives them as bitter is not part of the universe. /s
Maybe they’ve only eaten lemon skin? Which is definitely bitter
I actually just made a community for when you don’t know where to post something.
It’s simply irrelevant. If you believe this theory exactly nothing changes about what you can predict about the world. That’s what knowledge is all about. If you have a theory that doesn’t behave differently under some different circumstances, you’ve essentially said nothing.
Also reminds me a bit of the chapter in “Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman!” called “Is Electricity Fire?”, if someone knows that.
Consider math, it doesn’t make any empirical predictions on its own, as it is just a set of abstract symbols and rules. Do you consider mathematical facts to be a form of knowledge?
Maths and reality are different. Very different. Reality can be explored empirically while maths is logic not empirical. We can never say we are 100% sure about the rules/laws we have discovered about our reality, but we can say for sure that a maths theorem is true or false.
Maths is a set of self-consistent tools that can be used to predict what happens in reality. The mathematical description of reality is an estimate, contains countless assumptions and inaccuracies about where things are and what properties they have. In fact in quantum physics, we literally can’t know momentum and location at the same time.
Maths can describe (or I should say, approximate) realities that don’t exist.
Because maths and reality are different domains, we can know different things about them using different approaches.
In fact in quantum physics, we literally can’t know momentum and location at the same time.
I mean, we can know a precise wavefunction, though. That’s a bit like saying we can’t give a single point where a tsunami is. It seems highly likely to me personally that physics is mathematical and we’ve just kind of absorbed it in the process of evolving intelligence.
Arguably “it’s impossible to violate energy conservation given time-invariant action” is an empirical prediction, and that’s a specific case of Noether’s theorem.
Yeah, this isn’t really a theory yet. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s an invalid concept, though. For example, if game theory turned up in fundamental physics somehow, wouldn’t that suggest intelligence might be more fundamental than we assumed?
The question is if consciousness only exist on this level.
We know that ant hives have a hivemind that is not present in the individual ant. Similarly humans can also be observed to create a zeitgeist on larger than the individual scale. Even individual humans pass through different states of consciousness from birth to death. So it very much seems that consciousness is scalable. So where are we on that scale, can it be scaled down as well as up?
Most things in the universe have recursive properties. They can be scaled up and down or be understood as the sum of their parts. Saying that consciousness is an emergent property is no different, but it’s sort of dodging the question just as badly as someone saying it’s a magical new law of nature.
Perhaps AI can help us determine what the minimum number of required parts to create the emergent property is and why it isn’t present in the same setup with just one less part, or with a different complexity. I doubt we’ll find the answer, but it might lead to some better questions.
You can make it unlimited if it’s a strange loop.
No.
Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you; here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere, yes. Even between the land and the ship.
What else would be then? Whatever happens is part of the universe development. We are the universe being conscious of itself. We think we are something else apart, or self made…
“The universe danced towards life. Life was a remarkably common commodity. Anything sufficiently complicated seemed to get cut in for some, in the same way that anything massive enough got a generous helping of gravity. The universe had a definite tendency towards awareness. This suggested a certain subtle cruelty woven into the very fabric of space-time.”
- Terry Pratchett, Soul Music
i think that would be beautiful. [at the good times at least] being alive feels too special for it to just be some chemicals knocking about in the head, then you die and it stops
there’s so much we don’t know or understand about the world still – imagine how INSANE the internet or even TV would be to people in the 1700s. what if there are secret frequencies for the soul?
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Conciousness is just an emergent property of the multiple parts of the brain trying to interpret and respond to its surroundings.
Edit: I stand by what I said, but you all don’t need to be so mean and vile about it…
Wow. I’m glad you figured that out. I thought it was going to be so much more difficult.
It’s ok if you disagree! What do you think it is?
First, I appreciate your calm response in the context of my sarcasm. It’s not what I’m used to on the Internet, and it’s refreshing.
My simplest answer is that I don’t know. Neuroscience has made a lot of progress in the last several decades, but I’m unaware of any credible researchers claiming to have a unified theory of consciousness yet. We probably still have a long way to go, assuming it’s even possible to know.
it is not about disagreeing. It is your certainty and absolutism on matters that are in no way certain or absolute
That sounds like a swell, materialist solution, but it just kicks the can down the metaphysical road and creates more questions than it answers. What parts of the brain interact to create it? What is the subjective experience “made” of? Some kind of energy? How much complexity is required for it to emerge? Are there levels of consciousness? Are babies born with a consciousness that grows more robust over time, or does it pop in at some discrete level? Does the galaxy have an emergent consciousness, it’s certainly more complex than the human brain. What about the universe?
Even if “it’s an emergent property” is true, it’s not a very useful answer. It’s like saying babies come from the hospital, it skips over the part we’re asking the question about.
Panpsychism is probably the most scientifically conservative explanation of consciousness. “Energy fields permeating the universe and interacting with each other” is the model scientists use to explain many, many phenomena, from electromagnetism to mass.
We don’t have all the answers yet but we’re making progress in finding them.
All the evidence so far seems to indicate that consciousness is a purely physical phenomenon … despite the fact that it may not seem so to us
is just
My favorite response for this is ‘point to your mind.’
My mean response is ‘notexecutive@shi.itjust.works is just a random user name with some words attached and no person actually exists behind it.’
Another response could be “A car is just some wheels and an engine.”
Sure would be fun to watch someone try and drive some wheels and an engine.
The point of emerging systems is that they tend to be more than just a sum of their parts:
Do you need to be so needlessly rude?
Is ‘your’ interpretation of things the only one that exists?
No one’s been rude though, I don’t know what you’re considering “rude” or “vile”
