Panpsychism is the idea that everything is conscious to some degree (which, to be clear, isn’t what I think). In the past, the common response to the idea was, “So, rocks are conscious?” This argument was meant to illustrate the absurdity of panpsychism.
Now, we have made rocks represent pins and switches, enabling us to use them as computers. We made them complex enough that we developed neural networks and created large language models–the most complex of which have nodes that represent space, time, and the abstraction of truth, according to some papers. So many people are convinced these things are conscious, which has many suggesting that everything may be conscious to some degree.
In other words, the possibility of rocks being conscious is now commonly used to argue in favor of panpsychism, when previously it was used to argue against it.
I think the whole issue is stuck on our inability to define consciousness. I think that it lies on a spectrum like everything else that has to do with the mind, so we need to maybe operationalize it somehow. Maybe make up a units of consciousness for variables on the spectrum: perception, working memory, planning, execution, etc. Would it be nodes like respective neurons?
I think it’s interesting that we all know what we’re referring to when we communicate about consciousness, but we can’t define it. It’s one of those fundamental concepts like energy in physics or pleasure in psychology. Like, define energy: energy is something. Define pleasure: it feels good? Is consciousness the thing experiencing things? Or is consciousness the experience itself, and our human brains aren’t capable of defining it because we’re stuck with limited dimensions, like trying to imagine a 4th spatial dimension? Is there a higher level of consciousness that emerges from our collective individual consciousnesses? HELP 🤯