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Is panpsychism accurate? Modern physics delivers a reality check.
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According to panpsychists, all of reality is infused with experience. In other words, the fundamental ingredient of reality, they believe, has the felt quality of experience in it.
In this view, the reason that we humans are conscious is that we’re configured based on these fundamental experiential ingredients.
If philosophers don’t try to mesh their long-held views with what we’re discovering from good science, then we have a problem. For instance, panpsychism may be due for an update: panprotopsychism, a view that says as these fundamental ingredients combine, they give rise to conscious experience and that those fundamental ingredients are “quasimental.”
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SUSAN SCHNEIDER
Susan Schneider is the NASA/Baruch Blumberg Chair at the Library of Congress and NASA, as well as the director of the AI, Mind and Society Group at the University of Connecticut. Her work has been featured by the New York Times, Scientific American, Smithsonian, Fox TV, History Channel, and more. Her two-year NASA project explored superintelligent AI. Previously, she was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton devising tests for AI consciousness. Her books include The Language of Thought, The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, and Science Fiction and Philosophy.
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TRANSCRIPT:
SUSAN SCHNEIDER: Panpsychists claim that all of reality is infused with experience. And what they mean by that is very intriguing. They mean that the lowest level, the fundamental particles or the strings, whatever it is that’s the fundamental ingredient of reality actually has the felt quality of experience in it. And the reason that we humans and other sophisticated biological systems are conscious is that we’re configured in very sophisticated ways based on relations between these fundamental experiential ingredients. Now I’m critical of this. I’ll tell you why. Some people would say that it’s a funny view.
But I don’t think it is a funny view that there’s something intrinsically wrong with the position. After all, there have been religious traditions, like Buddhism, that have held this position for years. But my problem is how it meshes with today’s work in fundamental physics. So right now, there is a terrible contradiction between relativity theory on the one hand and quantum mechanics on the other. There is an issue about, essentially, how to relate the big elements of reality to the fundamental small ingredients at the quantum level. And these solutions seem to preclude the idea that there would be anything like subjects of experience at the ground level. These ideas often claim that space and time are themselves emergent.
They come from relations between fundamentally non-spatial and non-temporal ingredients. But if reality’s fundamental ingredients aren’t spatial, I don’t understand what the panpsychists mean when they claim that these little elements of reality are subjects of experience. And if time isn’t fundamental, which some of these theories claim, then I certainly don’t understand how there could be subjects at the fundamental level, because consciousness seems to be inherently a temporal phenomena. It causes events in the mind to happen for one thing. And when we introspect our own conscious activity, we’re not static beings. We exist in time. So I think there’s a fundamental mystery here.
And I think that there is a view that’s like panpsychism, which would be much more friendly to that work on how to reconcile quantum mechanics and relativity theory. That work, by the way, is within an area known as quantum gravity. So I think the possible route to reconciliation here that is still friendly to what the panpsychists say is to think that there may be prototime at the fundamental level. So even if there’s nothing like time, and even if there’s nothing like space, it would seem friendly to the idea that there’s protospace and prototime. And if that’s the case, that is quite friendly to a view that’s known as panprotopsychism, which is, by definition, a view that says that the fundamental ingredients as they combine give rise to conscious experience, and that those fundamental ingredients are quasimental.
So that might be one way that the panpsychist could modify her view that is more loyal to the actual work in physics right now on quantum gravity. That being said, there are a lot of different theories of quantum gravity. There’s a lot of controversy i…
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Another scientist on 'Big Think' that's ignorant of the history of philosophy (yet criticizes "philosophers" and ignores the panpsychist physicists) pertaining to the area that they are called in as a supposed expert about. Alfred North Whitehead and Henri Bergson were well ahead of her over a century ago. Many of the most famous "panpsychists" were process philosophers who saw time as ontologically fundamental. Many were also critical of the dualistic notion of the 'subject', and preferred an event ontology as a way of superseding that subject-object dichotomy. Whitehead in particular argued for a 'panexperientialism' in which experience, as a kind of felt interactivity of protoconsciousness, accompanied spacetime processes. He was also a mathematician who wrote extensively on the philosophy of science and came up with his own theory of relativity. He was not ignorant of modern physics, which as she pointed out in the video can't really decide anything definitely about these matters of fundamental reality, consciousness, space, time, etc. anyways. Bergson argued that was because the natural tendency of the calculative intellect and the methodological dependence of science on quantification and repeatability occluded the true nature of time.
The only philosopher I know of that argues for a non-temporal panpsychism is possibly Arthur Schopenhauer, who died in 1860… Really, it seems to me that there are more physicists than panpsychist philosophers that argue against the reality of time, but maybe I'm just ignorant of some new movement of atemporal panpsychists?
She is categorically full of shite. Today's fundamental physics are equally full of shite. They began with an incorrect premise produced by Einstein and built on over many years. There is only experience and the experience. Time requires an Observer, we do not "exist in time".
Panpsychism did nothing wrong.
I've done hard fucking psychs, big hits of freebase DMT on strips of acid. Everything seems real on these drugs but the one thing that I am confident to actually stand by and believe as being more than a drug delusion is the oneness.
That everything is one. That is the one thing I'd be like fuck, that's not just tripping that's real. You can get there sober meditating too. I haven't but I know you can.
If consciousness is the ONLY inherent thing about our being (I think therefore I am, being the only thing we can prove), and we ARE existence itself, then is consciousness an inherent property of existence too?
I am not sure. But Eastern philosophy meshes very well with psychedelic drugs and I tend to believe the BASIC principles of those types of belief (AKA NOT the added BS like Karma invented by humans) are 100% accurate. I'd hedge my bets on that.
a reality check? thank you authority.
materialistic science is holding back humanity from understanding the nature of reality in a big way and not until psychedelic is legal and every scientist have to go thru a psychedelic experience then we might see some chance.
It's easy to confuse the temporal phenomena happening within consciousness as the consciousness itself. That's the mistake most people make including her. The truth of the matter is so much simpler and profound. It's overlooked by the majority of people because its so subtle. I wish i could snap my fingers and make people become aware of it, but the only way for them to understand the boundlessness of consciousness is to see it for themselves.
Content made no sense but I stuck around for the eye candy.
"Experiences" always seems to be meant as "like human experience", because that is all we know. There may be much subtler and simpler levels of experience out there, that big-brained humans would consider to be "nothing at all". Yet to the entities, some level of sensation may be present.
Until a definitive connection is made between brain states and a sense of being, claims that brains are needed for a sense of experience appear to be little more than anthropocentric assumptions. Just giving another gong to humans' "killer app".
It was not so long ago in history the most respectable view was that all other animals were just "biological machines" without any sense of experience, which of course was profoundly wrong.
You'll get a better scientific understanding of the Hard Problem from Don Hoffman. Space and Time are created as a desktop that you create as icons for experience. Time is not fundamental. Consciousness only seems to be temporal… We do not exist in Time, we create Time. She is still stuck on the fact that she "knows" things and uses those referents to describe Pansychism, which is not really possible.
There are a bunch of things that require explanation or definition for even the smart ones among us (certainly not me! 😆) to make sense of the argument.
1st, do quantum mechanics and relativity actually suggest that either space, time or spacetime, as the case may be, aren’t fundamental? If they do, is that because space/time truly aren’t fundamental, OR is it simply the mathematical consequence of our theories not being complete; eg no theory of everything?
What are the range of possible definitions of “proto-time” or “proto-space” that could be accepted as plausible? How are “proto-space” or “proto-time” not simply smaller increments of actual space or actual time?
The fact is you can't separate experience from what you experience and call physics. You never will. You'll never not notice something and call it physics, and physics will never know something from your perspective and not call it "you". Is it experience in the small? Yes, yours, or the question of the root of experience/consciousness is unnecessary and should be tossed to the side simply to experience and qualify experience. As for time, it's just reason and processing, as fits relativity, or a measure of changes beyond your simple consciousness encompassing it, which fits entirely with panpsychism and QM. Or am I wrong? Please let me know.
This video is a joke, I really wanted to listen to someone more serious and rational explaining this, she is just saying what she believes in or not in a very complicated or convoluted way and we don't care what she believes in, you teach nothing in this way, it's like I'm in dum b bizarro world today with anyone trying to explain novel or complex concepts they can't even understand themselves, get someone intelligent to explain this!
One scientist's opinion portrayed as "modern science" which speaks to us, as well as claims to know what reality is exactly, and to DELIVER the "truth" about it… in a rubric called Big THINK… That title alone says everything about the following content, doesn't it?
What?
Frying panpsychosis
She's beautiful. I just feel in love.
…Am I the only one who feels like this lady only recognizes one single kind of panpsychist belief?
Panpsychism is basically fallacy of composition. Water is wet … Are the (bulding blocks) molecules that made water wet?? Wetness is a propriety we attribute to a group of water molecules a single water molecule is not even a liquid.
I'm a big fan of Panpsychism, thou I still even after 2,5 millennia don't consider it to be finalized, I'm as well a big fan of quantum gravity, is there any academic paper, or any source trying to unite those? To me this really seems to be the way to go 😀
Dr Susan Schneider. please partake in psilocybin and DMT. Then come back and report what you've experienced cause there is much more than this physical world we currently see.
There is nothing that compels me to presume that small scale phenomena are more fundamental than large scale phenomena, or that consciousness implies subjectivity or time. To the contrary, there seems to be agreement among practitioners of consciousness exploration that the deepest or purest types of conscious experience available to us are defined by timeless and selfless qualities.
Also, there may be no particle at all, rather it is the mode of inspection and the conscious intention behind it which provides particle-like and entanglement-like appearances. It is the unity provided by the observer themselves which reflects back the entangling effect of their own observation to them.
Panpsychism makes much more sense within the framework of a process-relational ontology.
Whitehead FTW
Responsiveness
How could you prove pan-protopsychism since it would involve measuring subjective experiences of subatomic particles.
Big Think is bringing third rate "philosophers" into their studio
Panprotopsychism fails to overcome the same problem as panpsychism: the combination problem. Subjects and experiences do not sum. Idealism offers a way to keep fundamental consciousness without this problem. In regard to time, Michael Pelczar shows how to reduce time to phenomenological facts.
Flashback: Ouch!
I should never have signed up for that sophomore level class
without taking the prerequisite.
*
But I was entertained while I doodled.
*
Photon walks into a bar,
has a couple drinks,
pays for them,
and gets up to leave.
Bartender asks, “Did you have coat?”
Photon says, “No, I’m traveling light.”
She's pretty hot, and I would fuck some sense out of her brains.
I'll agree with her at least this far, and I think either unwittingly or wittingly she's making a Michael Silberstein type point, no actual spatial dimensions and add – matter really isn't primary 'stuff', it just means that panpsychism is more of a psychological comfort point that momentarily helps people work through cognitive dissonance while their on their way out of naive materialism and on their way toward something like dual action monism.
Single handedly ending the dumb-blonde stereotype. 🙂
EDIT: Upon closer examination it seems she’s actually brunette, but dyed her hair blonde. Stereotype remains intact.
Quantum Gravity is replete with competing theories. It’s one of the true frontiers of science.