> On 30 Jan 2020, at 18:59, Philip Thrift <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > On Thursday, January 30, 2020 at 11:26:09 AM UTC-6, Brent wrote: > > > On 1/30/2020 1:28 AM, Philip Thrift wrote: >> >> >> On Wednesday, January 29, 2020 at 6:17:11 PM UTC-6, Brent wrote: >> >> >> On 1/29/2020 11:55 AM, Philip Thrift wrote: >>> >>> Now the human brain IP-power is like 10^whatever times that of a rock. >> >> Is it? A rock has a lot of atoms that can be a lot of states, like 1e30. >> Maybe it has to do with connections and signals and sensors and environment. >> Not IIT. >> >>> Also, a human brain has more IP-power than that of a chimp - its language >>> ability shows that. >> >> And your computer has more arithmetical ability than you do. >> >> Brent >> >> >> >> If a rock has more information processing power than a brain, and if >> consciousness is information processing (a lot of it) then why isn't a rock >> conscious? >> >> But a rock isn't conscious! > > According to panpsychists (and maybe IIT) it is. > > Brent > > > from Ph.D. Thesis - Hedda Hassel Mørch > > https://www.newdualism.org/papers/H.Morch/Morch-dissertation-Oslo2014.pdf > > > What do defenders of panpsychism normally mean when they say that everything > is mental? It seems generally agreed upon that the “pan” of “panpsychism” > requires that mentality is to be attributed to at least every fundamental and > concrete thing, in addition to humans and other animals. Being concrete means > being non-abstract, perhaps in virtue of being spatiotemporal, so numbers and > other abstract objects are excluded from the thesis.
This automatically makes that “panpsychism” incompatible with Mechanism. With Mechanism, we are abstract, immaterial being. We can understand this by the fact that in principle we can change our body for a new one every morning, and we can download ourself on the net, etc. With Mechanism, we possess a (local) body (emerging from infinitely many computations), and so we are not that body: we possess it like we can possess a bike or a car. Advantage: we can save our soul on an hard-disk. Problem (psychological problem for some): we are duplicable, and duplicated by huge number (perhaps transfinite cardinal) “all the time”, personal identity is an indexical illusion, physics is reduced to arithmetic/meta-arithmetic, etc. > The fundamental concrete entities are often taken to include at least the > ultimate particles of physics, but to exclude most ordinary objects like > tables, chairs and rocks. > > Therefore, panpsychism does not require that such ordinary objects [like > tables, chairs and rocks] have mentality But then why put some consciousness in their elementary parts, and what make a brain transporting consciousness and not a table or a chair? An answer would that it is the organisation of matter which counts, but then we are back to some form of mechanism. > > > (as emphasized by Strawson [Realistic Monism*]. The same goes for more > esoteric objects sometimes considered by philosophers, such as undetached > rabbit parts or the set of my nose and the planet Venus (however, see Goff > (forthcoming) for an argument to the contrary). Such presumably > non-fundamental things can be regarded as mental only in virtue of having > mental parts or constituents, i.e., in the same indirect way that we ordinary > think of a society of people as having mentality. > > * > http://www.sjsu.edu/people/anand.vaidya/courses/c2/s0/Realistic-Monism---Why-Physicalism-Entails-Panpsychism-Galen-Strawson.pdf > > <http://www.sjsu.edu/people/anand.vaidya/courses/c2/s0/Realistic-Monism---Why-Physicalism-Entails-Panpsychism-Galen-Strawson.pdf> Physicalism entails a non Mechanist theory of Mind, but Physics never address the problem of consciousness/matter, and is based on no evidence available. Again, I think it is better to test simpler theory before jumping to magical conclusion… I try hard to find some sense to “panpsychism” which would be coherent with Mechanism (Darwin & Co.). The close I could imagine is that the arithmetical truth would have some consciousness, but then it has to be something rather weird. Only person are conscious. Consciousness is just knowledge, and knowledge is just true belief. Physical consciousness is more: it is belief + truth + consistency (that makes it “immediate” indubitable” and keep intact its undefinability (that we feel when we introspect ourselves). This also has many consequences like explaining “free-will”, providing a functional role to consciousness, and a general role in the selection of the computational histories (but those are not related: free-will is NOT that selection!). It provides also an objective theory of morality (or more general Protagorean virtue), but the theory is “negative”. It says that it is immoral to do moral. It explains that a religious or moral sermon leads to the contrary effects, and explain why the institutionalisation of religion/moral leads to Atheism and Suffering (a point rather well explained by the Marquis de Sade, up to make him doubt at some point of atheism, as Sade realise that if the goal is to make people suffering: the institutionalisation of religion gives the better tool for doing this. You can recognise the laws of “Wellcome to insecurity” by Lan Watts, but also single out by the Taoists (Lie-tseu notably) and which all have the shape []x -> ~x. Of course in theology (G) we have already a pretty simple solution: []<>t -> ~<>t If I prove my consistency then I am inconsistent. Consistency is a sort of abstract ancestor of all moral virtue, and somehow, morality is related to surviving. People are attached to matter, and they are right, if they want to keep up its existence, you need to reject mechanism. But Mechanism explain both consciousness (and qualia, …) and the “matter appearance”, May be if you decide that number are God’s object of thought, that is “ideal object”, then mechanism is a panpsychism, but that does not teach us anything new, and it is better to avoid metaphysics at the level of the numbers, given that we are using the numbers to define all the rest and formulate the metaphysical question. What *is* coherent here (not with Mechanism, but with the “fundamental result” (that Mechanism and Materialism are incompatible), is the search for pretty weird theory of mind, when you want keep an ontological matter). 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