On 1/31/2020 1:29 AM, Philip Thrift wrote:
On Thursday, January 30, 2020 at 5:34:00 PM UTC-6, Brent wrote: On 1/30/2020 9:59 AM, Philip Thrift 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 <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. 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 mentalityRight. Having solved the problem of where mentality comes from by simply asserting it's inherent in everything, then panspychism was faced with the problem that ordinary objects were obviously not conscious (Aaronson's common sense critereon). So this solved that asserting that only special arrangements of fundamental particles are conscious. Panpsychists haven't been able to say exactly which arrangements are conscious but some people are betting in brains. Brent As Strawson puts it:One thing we do know about matter is that when you put some very common-or-garden elements (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, sodium, potassium, etc) together in the way in which they're put together in brains, you get consciousness like ours – a wholly physical phenomenon. (It's happening to you right now.) And this means that we do, after all, know something about the intrinsic nature of matter, over and above everything we know in knowing the equations of physics. Why? Because we know the intrinsic nature of consciousness and consciousness is a form of matter.
A non-sequitur. The valid conclusion is we know something about certain arrangements of matter.
If one took the human brain and built a massively parallel computer that executed a simulation of the equations (physical theory) for all the neuronal cells of the brain and it was conscious, that would disprove panpsychism.
And how would you know whether or not it was conscious? From its behavior (which is how we tell whether other people or animals are conscious)...but in that case why is it relevant that it be a simulation of a human brain. Anything that passes the conscious behavior test, should be counted conscious.
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