Panpsychism seems logically more possible than the alternative. If consciousness is an emergent property of complex systems, the universe is probably conscious because it’s the most complex system there is.
Comment on The Sensory Biology of Plants
ameancow@lemmy.world 3 days agoNot sure if you know that what you’re describing has a name it’s called Panpsychism and it is gaining some popularity but that’s not because there’s any reason to believe in it or any evidence, it’s a fanciful idea about the universe that doesn’t really help or connect anything. IE: panpsychism doesn’t make for a better explanation for anything than the idea that you are just a singular consciousness living in it’s most probable state to be able to observe or experience anything.
I’m not shooting it down, it’s one of those things we just will never know, but that’s a pretty huge list of things and possibilities so I just don’t know if it’s more or less useful than any other philosophical view.
agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
ameancow@lemmy.world 3 days ago
It depends on if you think consciousness is something that emerges from information exchange systems or some higher level “thing” we don’t understand yet, and I lean towards the idea that consciousness emerges from information exchange systems. If that’s the case, then the universe, while containing massive areas of complexity, isn’t entirely exchanging information, only in isolated areas that are borrowing energy even as entropy broadly decreases. I would be more open the idea of some possibility of consciousness occurring in the hyper-low entropy state of the very early universe when everything was much closer together and there was enough energy to connect a whole universe worth of information.
agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Who knows what energetic structures exist within galactic super clusters? Energy is constantly exchanged in the universe.
ameancow@lemmy.world 2 days ago
There are massive problems with ideas like individual galaxies making up parts of some kind of galactic neural network where the information being exchanged takes place of billions of years to form some “super thought.”
Not the least of which is that it doesn’t say anything, it’s a stoner thought that for all I know is totally true, but it’s so impossible to either prove, model or test, and it doesn’t provide a more plausible explanation for anything.
We can just as easily say that a handful of gravel I pick up may form some kind of neural network because technically they are sharing information in subtle ways. A panpsychist might say “exactly?” and I just say “Why? What does this idea explain better than the models we have now?”
The other huge problem is the expansion of the universe and the way light behaves. I am not sure the cosmic super entity is doing so hot considering how rapidly it’s tearing itself apart. Since light doesn’t really experience time either way, those “thoughts” trapped in patterns of light rays basically had one moment of thought and then dispersed so far and wide that it was essentially instant. I could easily come up with workarounds that keep the idea alive, but then at that point aren’t we just desperately trying to find God?
m_f@discuss.online 3 days ago
I don’t think I’m talking about panpsychism. To me, that’s just giving up and hand wavey. I’m much more interested in trying to come up with a more concrete, empirical definition. I think questions like “Well, why aren’t plants conscious” or “Why isn’t an LLM conscious” are good ways to explore the limits of any particular definition and find things it fails to explain properly.
I don’t think a rock or electron could be considered conscious, for example. Neither has an internal model of the world in any way.