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.
People being convinced that something is conscious is a long, long way from a compelling argument that something is conscious. People naturally anthropomorphize, and a reasonably accurate human speech predictor is a prime example of something that can be very easily anthropomorphized. It is also unsurprising that LLMs have developed such conceptual nodes; these concepts are fundamental to the human experience, thus undergird most human speech, and it is therefore not only unsurprising but expected that a system built to detect statistical patterns in human speech would identify these foundational concepts.
“So rocks are conscious” isn’t, at least in my opinion, the classic counter to panpsychism; it’s an attempt at reductio ad absurdum, but not a very good one, as the panpsychist can very easily fall back on the credible argument that consciousness comes in degrees, perhaps informed by systematic complexity, and so the consciousness of a rock is to the consciousness of a person as the mass of an atom is to the mass of a brain.
The problem with panpsychism is, and has always been, that there’s absolutely no reason to think that it’s true. It’s a pleasingly neat solution to Chalmers’ “hard problem” of neuroscience, but ultimately just as baseless as positing the existence of an all-powerful God through whose grace we are granted consciousness; that is, it rests on a premise that, while sufficiently explanatory, is neither provable nor disprovable.
We ultimately have absolutely no idea how consciousness arises from physical matter. It is possible that we cannot know, and that the mechanism is hidden in facets of reality that the human experience is not equipped to parse. It is also possible that, given sufficiently advanced neuroscience, we will be able to offer a compelling account of how human consciousness arises. Then—and only then—will we be in a position to credibly offer arguments about machine intelligence. Until then, it is simply a matter of faith. The believers will see a sufficiently advanced language model and convince themselves that there is no way such a thing is not conscious, and the disbelievers will repeat the same tired arguments resting on the notion that a lack of proof is tantamount to a disproof.
Fair points. My use of “primary” was a poor choice; I meant something along the lines of “most common among individuals who aren’t philosophers, in my experience.”
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 🤯
A rock with no electricity is just a rock. Meat with no electricity is just a body. Electricity is the only conscious thing there is.
I think any force will produce results if harnessed.
Imagine a plane without gravity.
Imagine a plane without gravity.
Like a space ship?
Interesting take! Is lightning conscious, then? The idea of Thor isn’t too far off if so, haha.
Considering how “fuck you in particular” lightning can be…maybe.
Electricity still needs a specifically built medium to pass through before it can form a consciousness, though. You can’t just send electricity through a tree and expect the tree to suddenly become conscious. Electricity is just a key ingredient of consciousness, not the full picture.
Bodies have neutral pathways that allow electricity to simulate consciousness if regulated properly. Same with computers and circuitry.
The word consciousness confuses everybody. Just ask yourself what the rock is aware of. The more aware something is, like better eyes or a better brain, the more conscious it is. That’s why when you sleep you are less conscious than when you are awake but still more conscious than a rock.
Sometimes i use the ugly spoon because i feel sad for it.
Yep, this is the major flaw that’s becoming clear about the Turing test, and why people are so hyped over LLMs: computers don’t have to be good at imitating people, because people are so good at anthropomorphizing computers (along with everything else).
You ask someone if the ugly spoon is human, they know it’s not.
We asked people if they were talking to a human, and it said yes.
These are not the same.
I see it as the opposite, and now that it’s getting uncomfortably close to seeming human, that makes people uncomfortable and so we are rejecting the turing test in favor of… what? It seems like nothing. It’s convenient that what makes us human is intangible.
We are the Pinnacle of creation! Nothing can be better than us by definition! Even the thought that a mere complex computer can be a person is heresy and absurd and can only be answered by ridicule and mockery. /s
Unfortunately a lot of professional philosophers think a bit like the above :(
FYI, “anthropomorphizing” doesn’t strictly mean “viewing as human”. I never meant to imply that people see a spoon as a human being.
Anthropomorphization is the act of associating human qualities with non-human entities.
My point is that humans are remarkably good at doing this, even as far as, e.g., ascribing “unhappiness” to a spoon simply for being unused.
This kind of behavior is why we must be extremely wary of the Turing test and other measures of machine “intelligence” - humans may see intelligence even where none exists simply because it’s our nature.
I didn’t say they were the same thing; my whole point is that they are different. We’re talking about people thinking they’re talking to a human, compared to people attributing a single human attribute to a spoon. But probably not even really for the latter because if you ask someone if the spoon is actually sad, most everyone will say no.
if youre going to break it down to constituent pieces, then there is no difference between you and the complex rock.
In the past, the common response to the idea was, “So, rocks are conscious?” This argument was meant to illustrate the absurdity of panpsychism.
To me, this response does not illustrate any absurdity in panpsychism.
Not everyone finds it persuasive, yeah. It’s an appeal to intuition that many people, though not all, have.
Quantum mechanics is unintuitive. Appealing to intuition is not an argument, it’s avoiding bothering with an argument.
