I don't think we _all_ point at cat's behavior and conclude consciousness. I think its the behaviors you describe plus we see how anatomically similar to humans they are. As someone who believes consciousness is an emergent property of the configuration of matter that makes up our bodies, particularly our brains, it seems plausible that cats have some sort of recognizable version of experience to ours (though I'm very amenable to discovering that actually they don't).
But also jellyfish has goal seeking behavior, and a most of those other characteristics you mention, and my intuition (based on the vastly different neural structure and anatomy), is that they experience probably nothing.
I strongly agree with ergonaught, and disagree with what you're saying.
This tiny interaction I think is the the entire problem with how panpsychists talk about this.
Some panpsychists might try to actually say that there's a potential that trees and rocks have an internal subjective experience that is in some way comparable to human conscious experience (i.e. they feel some kind of "pain," that "hurts" them, and they "suffer". But I contend we have very little reason to believe that, and a lot of reason not to believe that. For example, with very, very little modification to my biology, I can eliminate this experience in myself (painkillers, anesthesia, other drugs, falling into a deep sleep, etc.)
Once you even slightly disrupt the structure of our brains functioning, it all falls apart. We feel nothing.
I think even most panpsychists would not take the above position, and would instead say "oh well, plant consciousness is entirely unrecognizable and might not even have reasonable continuity of consciousnesses. "Pain" wouldn't even make sense to a plant or a rock. We're just saying that the matter that constitutes plants and rocks have a very tiny (relative to humans) kind of "experience" but it's a huge mistake to anthropomorphize that, and you shouldn't feel like you're making grass "suffer" by cutting it.
^and if it's the second case, it's unprovable and uninteresting and "literally meaningless. Irrelevant."
> Some panpsychists might try to actually say that there's a potential that trees and rocks have an internal subjective experience that is in some way comparable to human conscious experience
Okay well that's silly and I've not met even one panpsychist who believes this "comparable to human conscious experience" portion
> Once you even slightly disrupt the structure of our brains functioning, it all falls apart. We feel nothing.
This isn't true. You can literally cut a brain in half and you appear to get two separate consciousnesses in one skull.
> I think even most panpsychists would ...
Sure... so why are you spending so much breath attacking the obviously weak form of the argument?
> ^and if it's the second case, it's unprovable and uninteresting and "literally meaningless. Irrelevant."
There have been lots of things, in fact pretty much all of them, that were unprovable and uninteresting until they weren't. People have to work hard to build the frameworks to talk about, test, and ultimately understand the universe. That's what people are trying to do with consciousness. It can be "too early" for your tastes, but that doesn't make the endeavor meaningless.
> Okay well that's silly and I've not met even one panpsychist who believes this "comparable to human conscious experience" portion
You, yourself, and Philip Goff and others talk about how "we might want to treat trees differently" suggesting (correct me if I'm misunderstanding you) that cutting a tree might "hurt" the tree, or cause "pain" to the tree, which is exactly what I mean by "comparable to human conscious experience."
> This isn't true. You can literally cut a brain in half and you appear to get two separate consciousnesses in one skull.
What you're saying doesn't address what I'm saying. I did not say that, exhaustively, all changes to the brain disrupt everything. Rather, I will clarify that there exist a subset of extremely small disruptions you can make to the brain that "turn the lights off" of consciousness in humans. Among them are a fairly tiny dose of anesthetic, or not breathing for about 5 minutes.
> Sure... so why are you spending so much breath attacking the obviously weak form of the argument?
Because I'm replying to a comment that suggests we might treat trees differently (if Panpsychicism were true). I would consider a statement like that to be the first category of panpsychist.
> ... but that doesn't make the endeavor meaningless.
I didn't say the endeavor is meaningless. I'm a strong proponent of prodding anything we can about consciousness, or anything in our universe for that matter. What's "too early for my tastes" is to believe the Panpsychist hypothesis is currently the best explanation.
Emergent property of a sophisticated brain (with it's own weaknesses).
But even if I didn't have a more compelling explanation, that doesn't mean I can't be highly critical of, or reach a conclusion that panpsychicism is highly unlikely to be approaching a good explanation.
But also, see the rest of my comment. The onus is not on me to arrive with a better explanation just because there's a bad explanation on the table.
If I come home and find a cookie on my counter, and someone said "I think that a space alien teleported the cookie there" and I said "I think that's unlikely to be the correct explanation." And then that person asked "Well, what's a better explanation?" and I said "Maybe someone broke into my apartment, felt guilty, and left a cookie there." and then grilled me on that counter-explanation.
I genuinely think emergent property of sophisticated brain is much closer to the correct explanation than panpsychism in terms of usefulness, predictive power, etc., and likelihood of getting closer to a satisfying answer. On the other hand, I'm not prepared to defend every aspect of that hypothesis. I am, however, prepared to criticize panpsychism.
I very much agree with this. It seems to me panpsychists make a redefinition of consciousness as some entirely alien, unrecognizable thing. So, if an atom is conscious, but has no sensory systems, no possibly way to store memory etc. Well the atoms are still "experiencing" something, it's just instantaneously vanishing and there's no continuity and you can't even fathom what the experience of an atom is like per epoch because it's so different from our consciousness.
I think this is a redefinition of consciousness and shifts the problem of explaining when an entity has an experience like we all think about experiences, which was the interesting part in the first place.
"The emerging properties model is not unfeasible, we could test it"
One thing you can do is disrupt the smaller individual components that make up the emergent property, and see if the property continues to exist.
I.e. you can put a motorized egg beater in your brain, and see if you still have the emergent properties of consciousness. My prediction is that the property will suddenly disappear.
Or can cut off blood to the brain for a little while.
The counter-argument will be that the consciousness unrecognizably changes, and once the blood comes back, that configuration of matter generally restores. None of this is convincing to me in any way, and I genuinely desperately want someone (a panpsychist) to explain how I'm thinking about this incorrectly.
If I cut out the antenna of my radio, radio waves don't cease to exist. I just broke a perfectly good radio. There are also many ways to break a radio that have nothing to do with its ability to capture radio waves.
I'm not implying consciousness is some mythical undiscovered force. My point is: How would you know if the components that you are toying with are indeed relevant to consciousness and not some proxy or supporting structure?
The answer is: you can't know. You can reach lesser conclusions (under the effect of drug X, area Y of the brain has decreased activity, resulting in change of behavior Z), but it says nothing about that subjective experience I mentioned earlier (qualia).
I don't doubt we could brute force this into a meaningful discovery, carefully mapping each part of the brain until we figure it out completely, including qualia. We're not there yet though.
While I don't like the radio analogy, I think we largely agree then.
If interested, the reason I don't like the radio analogy is that it presupposes that the configuration of the brain, and inputs isn't fundamentally the constituents of consciousness.
On the flip side, to fix the analogy: if I cut off the antenna of a radio, I would argue it ceases to become a radio by any reasonable definition (assuming we're talking about a device that receives radio waves and plays them back in the form of sound). You just have something that's very close to a radio. It has nothing to do with whether radio waves exist or don't.
As long as you agree that it's conceivable that there's experimentation (brute force or otherwise), then I think we're on the same page.
I'm not willing to abandon reproducibility, so I'm not on the "let's just philosophize and stuff" side, although I think it's relevant to do so.
I think the onus is on the brain folks. In order to solve this, they need to prove that qualia lives as an emergent property in the brain. I'm not presuposing tht the consciousness lives somewhere outside the brain, I'm asking for proof that it does (which is reasonable).
What we have is proof of neither and no way to get there. The reductionist approach offers a more systematic way of approaching the problem, but there are no guarantees. Breaking down a problem into smaller questions is not a proof if there are still smaller questions unanswered.
My strong personal assessment of this is that panpsychists (in general, if you can pin one down) are not talking about consciousness in a colloquial sense - but I think this is a mistake.
I think the common conceptualization of consciousness is the only definition that is useful, or makes sense. Which is something that can experience things. For many reasons, I don't think these rudimentary behaviors in plants suggest they are capable of experience.
I entirely agree with this, and I likewise think it's quite damning. But panpsychists don't see it this way. This is "the combination problem" and I predict they will never be able to solve this.
Edit: I should elaborate on how it relates. Some would say that the alcohol or foreign substances are disrupting the combination of the consciousness of the matter, disrupting the overall consciously experience that makes up your matter. So, for example, now there's a bunch of little consciousnesses that aren't "combined".
This is compelling and I think many elements of the spirit of this are true. The only thing I would add is that it will be interesting to see if professional, medium/high budget, polished, "produced" content will remain a stable and significant niche that is distinct from user-generated content. And does the high-production-value content directly compete with low-production value user-created content? And what percentage of a user's consumption it will represent in the future? And does the pool of available time for an individual consumer grow to accommodate both?
To put it another way, on some level, all content competes for our time, so it's all in competition. On a different level, a Twitch livestream or TikTok feels like an entirely different category of media from a scripted, high-production-value TV series or movie, and I want both in the world.
While traditional publishers may be losing % of daily media consumption - especially in younger age brackets - it's unclear to me where this trend asymptotes. My intuition is that most people will spend some time on "reels" or livestreams (or whatever), some time on blockbuster movies, some on Broadway plays, and some time on scripted produced "TV style" content. Some will expand their denominator of total time to accommodate additional media sources, others will pick one over the other.
It seems there will be a degree of loss of market share as you allude to, but it's unclear how dramatic it will be and where it stabilizes.
One thing is absolutely 100% for sure though in my opinion: media preservation should be deeply prioritized, and this news seems like a blow to that.
Yesterday was MTV News deleting their archive, right? But on your points: brace yourselves for AI-generated content, with increasing technical quality and probably also increasing entertainment quality. That will be The Flood and might wipe out the small human creators by their lack of discoverability, and replace the studios output because hey AI is cheaper than employing real humans. So what do we do then??? Also no archives because shareholder value (I think I use this term already too much)...
