Really enjoyed your take here, Dr. Schneider - thanks a lot for considering the matter so carefully. I would just politely add that a lot of the modern panpsychism movement seems to have grown out of ongoing problems with explaining human consciousness, rather than trying to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity. (Postulating consciousness as a fundamental property of matter, much as electromagnetism was eventually accepted in physics as a fundamental interaction.) It's quite tough at this point in our development to imagine how panpsychism's claims would even be tested experimentally in physics or neuroscience, let alone verified. But at least in trying to explain consciousness, if nothing else, panpsychism is a fun alternative model at the moment to the standard emergent explanations. Thanks again for the interesting thoughts.
My contention there is, is how ANY claim about consciousness can be tested or verified, when consciousness is inherently unobservable (because it is observation itself)? It may seem safe to assume that others are conscious in the same way you are, but that's just what it is: an assumption. Sure, we can observe things like brain waves, but that's far from observing someone else's subjective experience. Can we extend that logic to AI? How could we know? Sure, we have things like the Turing test, but that's not proof, it's a judgment made observing behavior, which, since "free will" is a logical impossibility... It would all come down to programming. I came to panpsychism myself simply because it's the only viable alternative I've seen to materialism, which... My problem there is that there's no logical process by which strictly material reagents result in an immaterial/abstract product. It's not just that we haven't discovered how it happens; that's like saying we just haven't discovered the logical process by which 0+0=1 I do think she's misrepresenting panpsychism here, too. It's not that what she's talking about isn't panphsycism, but that it's only one theory: it's kind of an umbrella term for a broad school of thought. Personally... Frankly, I'm not even sure which named branch best fits me, but what makes the most sense to me is that consciousness is a fundamental property of reality that experiences the physical (panexpirientialism, maybe?). Or rather, the potential for conscious experience is a fundamental quality of the universe, but is only expressed when there's something there to experience. This would help explain whether inanimate objects are conscious or not: well, sort of: there's something there, but nothing is being experienced when the material is static. Then again, those things aren't truly static on an atomic level, so who can say?
They completely missed the point in their video of consciousness. Before they talk about panpsychism they'd first have to understand what's meant with consciousness.
I think it is a bit premature to rely on these quantum gravity ideas to attack this sort of philosophical question. They are completely theoretical and have absolutely no experimental support at the moment. It makes any argument based on them extremely fragile, and a bit uninteresting. It isn't really using "modern physics" to attack the question, it is "speculative future physics".
I see your point, however i think that it significantly weakens panpsychism since whether or not it fails would depend on future scientific consensus, which makes panpsychism on shaky ground. I’m saying this as a person inclined towards panpsychism btw
@@nerosuperstardom It is absolutely fine to consider it but one shouldn't accept it as fact until it has been shown or proven to be possible. Until then it is just unfalsifiable hypothesis.
Listening to this I couldn't help but think the whole time 'this lady doesn't seem to know what she's talking about, actually...' I'd like to know where she got her 'doctorate' from. lol
I'm with you. The issues she raised may apply to some variants of panpsychism (like cosmopsychism for instance) but not others. Micropsychism for example (as I understand it) believes that space, time, and matter are all fundamental - alongside consciousness.
Personally, as someone who subscribes to panpsychism, I don't see how it necessitates time and space not being fundamental. Honestly, the number of different ways that you can imagine pan-psychic understandings of the universe means that you should really specify which versions you think are untenable.
We have no memories of ourselves being 2 years old, nevertheless we were conscious, we simply didn't record memories. Also, the fact that we can't imagine experience without time only means we lack imagination
I mean, almost by definition you can't imagine experiences you didn't have. It's like saying you can't imagine a new color. Well, the types of "integrated" experiences we have are predicted of the type of physical configuration we find ourselves in. That being said. People do report having experiences where their sense of time seems to drop somehow. Those are reported by meditators and psychonauts, there might have something to it. They also seem to be able to project higher order hyperbolic geometries in 3D visual field while using DMT.
The thing that botters me is how radically different experiencial domains are. Like smell is something completely different from vision. That makes you wonder. What kinds of dimensions of mental experiences we are missing out.
Also, in which sense is a smell something spaciotemporal. You can locate the source of smell but that seems like another type of qualia on top of the smell itself. Like smell is a sense datum and his location in your world simulation another. In that sense experience seems more like numbers. You could have an instance of three objects but that doens't mean that the number three is a spaciotemporal concept.
a single neuron doesn't have memories, but a network of them does. It's called Emergent Properties. same thing with all fundamental particles in the universe.
@@michaelwu7678 there are lots of reasons. But for example, multicellular organisms are an emergent property of single cells on an intrinsic level. Another way to look at it could be like how ants can act in phenomenal synchronicity to form multipurpose shapes and structures. There's not really any debating that emergence doesn't exist in our physically measurable world
@@michaelwu7678 It might be worthwhile that you consider Game of Life as an example. I suppose you can say that existence of some rules may lead into emergent properties when these rules are actuated. But you can easily make another rules for some other Game of Life, and you would not see anything emerge out of that. For example, if all atoms produced by this universe were completely non reactive, there would never be any sort of life, everything would remain inert, simple and lifeless.
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.”
...Oh my God. Wow! I was WONDERING whether anyone else had combined the two! Like, I came to panpsychism before I even knew the word through force of pure, anxious obsession over the hard-problem of consciousness. But thinking about what that would mean for inanimate objects, I was like... Well, with a static object, nothing is happening, there's nothing to be experienced. That led me to the conclusion that experience is contingent upon change. I stumbled upon process theory later, and wondered if anyone had thought that way. That's what you're talking about, right?
@@Hakajin Ready for a round 2? Theorem: Electrical activity is a necessary condition for cost-efficient molecular exchange of information. Proof: 1. Existence Since EEG works, as does MRI, the brain must employ electric signals, hence streams of electric potential changes, since it is consistently and measurably embedded in a standard model framwork. 2. Uniqueness The quantum of electric potential is precisely the electron. 3. Efficiency Polarization in the neuronal axons happens due to influx of sodium into potassium channels. Excess electrons are carried over. The energy required only depends on the local existence of these materials, and on chemical mobility via ATP, which is recycled in the Krebs cycle. Now, try to bring in that electrons are the observed interferences of a homogenous potential wave that loops in time (a consistent embedding of John Wheelers one electron universe in a wave formalism). And ponder how that relates to the Heisenberg principle and consciousness...
“If you have much of a focus on observation and experiment you run the risk of ignoring the role that deep thought and re - imagining has always played in scientific progress” Philip Goff - Professor of Philosophy, Durham University
I think the problem is seeing the human experience in a vacuum. If we have subjective experience, and intelligence, that means subjective experience and intelligence are inherent properties of the universe. They cannot exist apart from it . And as far as quantum physics versus classical physics, it’s not about how Objects relate to each other, it’s about how one single object relates to the immediate space around it , and how then that space in between affects the shape of time as it relates then to the next object
Adam Augustus in other words, If we view ourselves as part of the universe and not separate from the universe, then the explanation of everything is in our very own minds. Just part of a giant self similar pattern or a simple replication of everything
Adam Augustus Well its interesting , when we close our eyes and sleep at night and dream, we are still observing. And we see the same form of images when our eyes are open. So most likely we are looking inward when we think we’re living looking outward and we cannot take our perspective for granted . But I agree, consciousness transcends the flesh because if it didn’t , The first conscious form of Life would take all consciousness with it when it died
Adam Augustus The point is that in a sense, we should look at dreams and being awake as common unified experiences, not as a separate experiences. If we don’t control our thoughts at night, most likely we don’t control our thoughts in the day. And our lack of control implies that something bigger is working through us and that we are a part of something bigger than we think. This is why I always say one aspect of reality, or the universe , represents all aspects of both
@@MrSanford65 Woah Donza, I rarely have the feeling to read someone else's ideas and just agree line after line. Very good. You express yourself quite well, congrats. Don't lose your time with this "Adam" guy, the dude has a simplistic way to interpret things, it's quite obvious. But tell me something - "consciousness transcends the flesh because if it didn’t , The first conscious form of Life would take all consciousness with it when it died" ... what do you mean by these lines? Can you be more specific? Also I want to point out that i dont really think that "the first conscious form of life" is a real thing, k? Life in a large sense of the word goes from Now and regrets infinitely AND gradually until it comes back to be some chemical compounds loose in the ocean... just imagine a Forest. In which point you can say that a group of trees is OFICIALLY a forest? Same with life. There was not a point where we would find the "first conscious life form". It's gradual. Another example: imagin 0.000% to 100% (one hundred being now and 0 being any chemical compound before becoming organic, or having Carbon attched to it) Life in the real sense of the word in strict definition could be considered the 0.001% but wouldn't be intuitive to consider that this "life form" had died ay any point, since the "gore" characteristics of death would still inexist at this simple level of complexity. But anyway Another question (btw, im still searching for a positioning on this one, so im making my research) - have you ever found any good reason to believe that "Meaning" is a big thing in the Universe? If so, why? Can you fully justifiy your answer? Note that by "Meaning" i refer to the most profound and broad sense of this word - literally how any Organic Structure (since I don't have any good reason to believe that non-living structures could add Meaning to their experience) Perceives and Labels their experience, inserting Meaning at them. Waiting for your answer. tks
Like/Dislike and Comment; repeat Like/Dislike and Comment; repeat By The end of the first life being the end of consciousness, To put it another way, There are no two copies of human beings so there should be no two copies of consciousness . It should’ve ended with the termination of the first flesh, Never to be experienced again . But the conscious experience continues on interrupted. It doesn’t die with the flesh And has an eternal abstract quality to it that is like nothing else on earth. The same conscious experience I’m having now, is the same one Christopher Columbus had. You got a look at experience as something in and of it’s self separate. No two human beings are Exactly identical with the same identity, but the conscious experience is something that transcends all forms of life from humans down to the amoeba. See, it’s not how consciousness expresses itself externally to other beings, it’s how consciousness expresses itself to itself or to its host. I think how consciousness relates to itself or to its host is the common transcendent experience that does not die, Whether rowing a boat, or in a coma, or even when the heart stops beating. Does the universe have meaning? I’ll put it this way, every thought you have is real because nature /reality cannot falsify itself . So your memories, illusions, and fantasies all have true meaning it’s just how you symbolically interpret them . I think the brain is just a way of transferring consciousness, but I think meaning and life are in the field, the spaces in between objects. But at some point we can never know because whatever is at our core projects out so we can only go back but so far before self awareness cancels itself out . Also , Non-organic entities and dead bodies Have the exact same general properties, so its not beyond the realm of possibilities that all non-organic entities in the universe we’re once host for life. One aspect a reality has got to equal all aspects, because there’s no vacuum in nature to separate categories
I'm a Christian so I'm obviously not panpsychist, but I get the impression that she heard the idea and immediately came up with a retort to it. Not that she's dumb about it, but she comes at it with a bit of an attitude (I recognize I often do) in assuming that the problem she has isn't circulated in the groups of people who hold the idea she's criticizing.
If, as a Christian you, P1; believe God is an Infinite Mind or in other words a consciousness expressing itself in infinitely many ways. P2; believe God is all (which not all Christians do) this is to say that everything is an emanation of the divine. P3; believe that what emanates from a source carries the properties of said source, this is to say reflects its nature. C1;Then it would appear to me that you would fall into the category of some form of Pansychism. Or to put into clearer terms, If God is all and God is conscious then all is conscious (unless God is not all conscious but maybe only partially so, like islands of consciousness awaking to existence such as you and I). However, if Mind is one of the infinite attributes of God and all his attributes express itself as existent in infinitely many ways then the consciousness of God is infinitely existing. Which this just leads to more rabbit holes to explore but would suggest that all things which are an expression of the divine would also express itself in consciousness ranging from infinitely close to complete unconscious to infinitely close to perfect/complete consciousness. This is to Say the Infinite mind of God would be pure potentiality. But would this exclude the mind of God existing as Actual rather than merely as Potential though? Or could time (the infinite now) be the dividing line between the potentiality of Gods mind and the actuality of it? Here is what I mean. Everything in the future is still potential, it can exist in infinitely many different ways. But at the defining moment of now what is potential becomes what is actual and hence we can know it, or have knowledge. Hence the mind of God can become actualized in the same sense through the eternal now. This reminds me of Genesis 1:3 Vayomer Elohim, Yehi Aur vi-Yehi Aur. To speak or think God, Let it be/exist Light, and it did be/exist light. God made us in his image as is said, Let us make man in our Tselem (image), after our likeness. Does God have a 3D image? How can the infinite have a certain height, width, and depth and bound by a certain shape? If it is an absurdity to attribute a finite body to the infinite then we must ask "What is the Image we are made in?" To answer, we may want to first ask who is here in this verse in the Garden with him? Proverbs 8 tells us Wisdom was with God when he created the world. This is the image we are made in, as a reflection of the divine mind. H-Sapien Meaning Wise man. It is the Sophia, our Philo-Sophia being the "Love of Wisdom" or Philosophy. Since God is not corporeal and has no such body this sort of language is meant to be taken figuratively and not literally. Such as when God sits or rises, or moves, or has an outstretched arm, etc... These things are not meant to say that God was walking around and decided to sit down for a while. Rather this expresses the permanence and immovability of God. That God Sits in the Heavens is to say that Gods position of authority in the universe is from our perspective unchanging. So here in Genesis we see God speak. Yet God has no such lips nor is there someone external to God who can hear. As it says, I am God and there is None else. Or again Hear o Israel, the LORD our God The LORD is one. So even speaking there is none to hear so what is being expressed here is different than the expression of thought from one mind to another as we have in speech/language. God here isn't speaking from non existent lips. The word Vayomer has other interpretations which may provide a closer understanding of what is meant. Namely the concept of thought. Hence, God thought at this definite moment in Genesis 1:3 and it became or was. Hence Gods thought went from potentiality to actuality in a moment of time, as it is when God thought "let it be" that it was at that moment actually existing. Granted not all Christians do believe in these presuppositions but it appears to me that most do. So if we are careful with our words then by definition the Christian Position would appear to me as a Panpsychist view. At least in some potential ways as the word Pan means all, and if we are saying all is Mind (psyche), then it appears to me we are saying there is an infinite mind that is ALL. Hence GOD. This would seem to flow from our previous understanding of Vayomer, as all things would be nothing more than the thought of God being actualized. It is as if God captured the whole of our experience/existence in a single perfect thought expressed in the words "Let it be". I would personally be careful though as to say God "Thinks". This may be used as a close approximation to what we mean but I would be careful of putting human qualities on the Divine as if we are the epitome of perfection. If God thinks it is so far radically removed from our notions of thought that it may not be useful to call it such other than as a close approximation/attempted description of the ineffable.
a rock's behavior is one which they literally stand still and immovable, when you press on them they press back to hold their position, therefore that is a behavior and thus they are to some level conscious of you pressing on them. The notion that moving things that interact in more complicated ways are alive, is just a notion or an illusion emergint from our brain, it has nothing to do with awareness as a concept besides that it is just that... a perception. You can effectively see this when attending to people who somehow got damaged clinically in such a way that we consider them unconscious because they do not move as much even though people who have come-out of it are mentioning into their reports that they indeed were conscious albeit sometimes conscious of different things than just surroundings and so on. The concept of "stream of consciousness" is actually pretty interesting, implying that whatever we are as consciousness is simply perceiving a stream of information which are a cause-and-effect stream that goes to consciousness, this starts the "hard problem" of consciousness where the more you dig... the more you dig. Here you go. Up if you get it. Seems like "clever" scientists do not.
2. Physics doesn't even mesh with physics. Relativity v. Quantum theory. They tolerate each other within an uneasy truce at best. That's my understanding. If I'm wrong just explain, please. No need to be mean.
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?
I mean, panpyschism as I understand it doesn't maintain that a Higgs boson can be happy or sad. The ideas come back to awareness on a pretty simple level. I mean real simple. There's no claim to it that the boson has its own "will". It's a bit more in line with the ideas of reality as a sort of information-based hierarchical construct. And there are several of these. And it makes sense. If you look at object-oriented programming, they use classes of objects to reduce memory overhead. Each electron is identical as to properties, but has a unique quantum state. This would be a way to build a reality with a fundamental limit on computational capability. And no, this would not necessitate a simulation-based reality (though it is consistent with it). So, the real question is whether or not consciousness is emergent: The answer is clearly yes on the human level, whether you approach it from reductionism, theism, deism, or just about any variant of those. We know that our "classical physics" experience is emergent from quantum phenomena. So the panpsychism variant referred to as constitutive panpsychism is pretty consistent with even reductivism, as the notion is that the components (term used loosely) are either inherent in or arise from material components. Given our human tendencies, I can understand the desire to parse this out to the extreme and eliminate even the hint of spiritualism from any scientific study. It generally helps keep us honest. But in this case, as long as we keep our feet on the metaphorical ground, I tend to think this is worth a look. Worst case, it doesn't come to anything other than a philosophical footnote.
She claimed consciousness "causes" events in the mind to happen, which I don't think anyone is claiming. In fact I think panpsychists believe the human body could do everything it does, including thinking, making choices and acting on them without consciousness, and consciousness (the inner experience) is actually unnecessary.
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.
Empty assertions. Besides the more closely you look, the more clearer it becomes that consciousness *is* it's contents. It is a sequence of qualia. In a way Buddhists knew that thousands of years ago.
@@MrCmon113 The closer you look the more of "you" disappears. People mistake their life's sequence of qualia as their personal identity but no matter what story is being told by the mind, there is a fundamental unchanging nature in everyone's experience. What is left when the personal story of the mind is no longer there? Awareness, absolutely empty yet infinitely whole, unrestricted by any concept, untouched by experience. This isn't a belief you have to see it within your own experience. Once you see it you will see how ridiculously obvious it is. Hidden in plain sight this entire life.
I'm glad to hear a professional taking about this topic seriously. However, I think it's possible she may have a misunderstanding about what she's discussing around 2:03. I don't know about panpsychism as much, but in regards to Buddhist philosophy, they do not believe the fundamental level of reality is made up of "subjects of experience", but instead is what they would call empty awareness. My understanding is that this empty awareness is the base of consciousness, and consciousness is the only way anything is experienced. Also, this awareness is dimensionless and eternal; essentially it is pure potential. A good anaolgy is that awareness is like a movie screen and everything experienced in it (emotions, sensations, the universe) are all the light that's projected onto the screen to create a movie. This analogy also helps clarify what is meant when people say the self is an illusion, because we identify with what's on the screen (the movie), but what we all truly are is the screen itself. Even when the movie ends the screen is still there waiting to take on the next movie.
@@shouvikb Practicing meditation and listening to teachers are the best things you can do. The only way to really understand selflessness is to experience it directly, which mediation will help you do. For a good introduction on how to meditate I would google "Sam Harris how to meditate" and the top result should be a blog that guides you through the basics. I'd also recommend searching for "Guided Meditation with Sam Harris Long Version" and using that as an audio guide to start. He also briefly covers the idea of the self being an illusion in that. Lastly, I would recommend listening to the lecture "Alan Watts: The World As Self Part 1". Those few resources will give you a good quick overview of the types of things I mentioned above. Hope that helps!
I feel like this talk would've benefited from a more in-depth introduction to the topic. Maybe present an alternative or orthodox view that contradicts panpsychism, so comparisons become easier?
I couldn't follow along because of how stressed out totally pissed off she is. Is she the freakout interviewer from a major media outlet? Someone much calmer should've been the one to discuss this, not her!
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.
Sadly, I agree. Space and time being emergent phenomena is questionable. Are they even physical phenomena? Objects (electrons, quarks, photons, and the like) in space and time are. Kant's premise is much more clear and reasonable: space and time are mental apriori's, mental constructs just like causality, not necessarily a part of physical reality.
This video does not do the panpsychist view any justice. She deals with quite a Strawman version of panpsychism. There are many variation of the panpsychist view, many of which are compatible with modern physics.
The flaw in her logic was saying that consciousness is a temporal phenomenon. There is no proof that is a true statement at this time. There is no proof that it is false as well and that is why the theory is a valid field of investigation. But to claim it’s nonsense based on an assumption is not science.
...This is an extremely limited take on panpsychism. To start out with, the point that it's unverifiable: this is true. It's also true of every other theory on consciousness, because consciousness is inherently unobservable, by fact that it's observation itself. Sure, it may seem like a safe assumption that other people are conscious like you are, but that's just what it is: an assumption. You can look at brain scans, but that's far from experiencing someone else's objective experience. Even if you could look at a monitor where what they're seeing is displayed (which we actually do have some limited capability for), how do you know that they're "seeing" it in the same way you are? What about AI? We have things like the Turing test, but, since everything comes down to programming, that's still only an inference based on observable behavior. Then the question is, why complicate things? But it's really not complicating things at all: I arrived at panpsychism not by its own merits (actually I'd never heard the word at the time), but because I realized that there's no logical process by which material reagents result in an immaterial/abstract product. To say that we just haven't figured it out yet is like saying we just haven't figured out the logical process by which 0+0=1. The view that the material is inherently conscious is only one version of panpsychism; it's actually a broad school of thought. My own view is that the potential for consciousness is a fundamental part of reality, but subjective experience only occurs when there's something to be experienced. When there is material to be experienced, that material probably needs to be in motion, changing over time and exchanging material with its environment, because... Well, the video did get it right that experience is temporal.
Interesting points. It’s awhile since you wrote this. Your second main para; are you saying panpsychism is a solution to the mind/body problem - ergo dualism?
Jasper, and clearly lack of understanding from you. BIG THINK is about questioning your beliefs, laying edge cases, and making you think just about anything even remotely interesting.
I’m only kinda a panpsychist, but I think there’s some flaws in this theory if panpsychism so it almost seems like a straw man. I believe that consciousness is innate to the universe. Now this doesn’t mean that individual particles have subjective experience. Consciousness is almost like gravity, a permeating force of the universe. Everything has the potential to become conscious, but to become conscious requires something essential: information. Let’s take a rock for example. It has no organs, no method to sample the outside world nor process it. So it doesn’t think at all. Therefore there is nothing for consciousness to latch on to. Now let’s imagine a fish. It has eyes to take in the light of the outside world, nerves to feel the flow of the water, and a brain to process this information. This brain is so simple, all it can do is keep itself alive. Look for the next meal. Find a mate to have offspring. But deep down, it still feels that same “I am”. The “ego” of the fish doesn’t recognize this though. Now imagine you. You most likely have all the same things as these animals. Sight, smell, taste, hearing, and touch. But you have something special, something that goes beyond that. Maybe it’s the ability to process abstract information, or the luxury to think past just survival. But you became aware of your own awareness. Your brain got to a point where the information collection and processing could recognize there was an unforeseen variable. Something it couldn’t quite account for with its 5 senses. You realize that you are realizing things, and you aren’t quite sure how. That is consciousness, or what we usually refer to as “self awareness”. It is simply the information processor recognizing the spiritual variable of itself. So panpsychism at its core really just postulates that consciousness is a spectrum, and the mechanisms available in your brain allow for self awareness. To put it simply: you are the universe recognizing itself.
I feel consciousness will ultimately turn out to be defined as our name for recognising emergent behaviour from certain kinds of feedback loops. Not really an interesting thing, but a very cool experience. Namaste :)
Ok. You understand what you're talking about a lot more than I expected, given that title and your attitude. I would recommend working on your explanations until people can understand you without already being immersed in high-level philosophy of consciousness. You could try starting by laying out the Easy Problem and the Hard Problem, explaining physicalism, and then finally getting to panpsychism and its criticisms. I feel like that's the bare minimum for people to be able to follow along.
If you're as interested in receiving criticism as you seem to be in giving it, I think it would be better received by negating the first two sentences.
She's on the wrong track. The question of QM vs relativity is crucial to physics, but one's direct experience of the Essence of the mind (Rigpa), won't help answer that question, except to say that (per Shankara's Monism or Advaita Vedanta - the predicate of panpsychism), everything in the universe IS Pure Consciousness. (on all levels, micro and macro). One's apprehension of Pure Consciousness (Brahman), won't shed insight in the to precise rules of how particles can also be waves. It simply states that everything is Brahman (Sat-Chit-Ananda), discrete and continuously merged together (the Simultaneity of oneness and difference principle in Buddhism.). To experience That Pure Consciousness, the Substance (Spinoza's term), no problem. Access "Mahamritunjaya mantra - Sacred Sounds Choir" and listen to it for 5 min per day for at least two weeks. In due time your mind will transcend thought and tap into the Ground of Being,
She doesn't understand all that much of what she is saying either. She's using bigwordsalad to take a tribal position against an opposing view. Because "those other guys" are wrong.
i could be wrong but i believe that this is not actually panpsychism and that panpsychism is the belief that the whole universe is one consciousness not that every atom somehow individually has it's own consciousness
She showed her hand at the very end when she declared it a "problem" that panpsychism doesn't meld with physics. You have to be open to either amending your understanding of what might be the fundamental building blocks of the world, or you have to consider the idea that our understanding of physics doesn't hold all the answers to how life works. As Philip Goff puts it, Newtonian physics is excellent at quantifying things, but it can't tell you much of anything about what is actually is to be something, or to have the subjective experiences we all have all the time. So I think getting through to someone like the woman in this video is a bit like arguing with a religious fundamentalist. Things are the fundamentalist's way, and he won't budge to even consider that another point of view might even be possible.
I guess Chopra was unavailable this time? That was five minutes I'll never get back. Oh wait, time is a subjective experiential phenomenon so never mind.
@@omnishambles4477 Except the elapse of time changes with speed and gravity. This is to say it is ot absolute. But perhaps "subjective" is not the right word.
@@brendarua01 It is an absolute value, just not a constant. A clock may run differently when it's in orbit, but it'll be the same amount of change for every functional clock under the same gravity. (The change from speed is because of inertial gravity.)
What’s her evidence for saying consciousness is temporal? Many biocentrists will say that consciousness is non-temporal, hence the explanation for experiences that transcend space and time. She’s assuming consciousness is not fundamental!
If I were a pan-psychist, I would point out that humans do have the capacity to experience consciousness outside of time. It's commonly reported in deep meditative states or psychedelic trips. I think a better definition of consciousness is simply the exchange of information. You could say that brains are hyper-conscious because they are locuses of information exchange between our environments/senses and our bodies/DNA. By that definition, even a rock is conscious as the sun emits heat onto it's surface, because photons are a source of information.
Yes! A rock is conscious. Not only because of sun light argument. A geologist will provide you information about rock source, composition, etc. That rock stores information/energy and it will change function of surroundings (water, sun light, weather, etc). The only question is if that rock is self-conscious, like humans & etc are (some might argue that all humans are self-conscious:)). Most likely, the rock is not self-conscious. The assumption will be that rock has a smaller level of consciousness than humans (some might disagree that all humans have a greater level of consciousness than rocks:)).
Just because people have reported that they experienced consciousness outside of time doesn't mean they actually did. Also, by definition consciousness is the state of being aware of and responsive to one's surroundings so no, I'm afraid a rock is not conscious in any sentient way anyway.
@@TheTruthKiwi By A definition of consciousness, perhaps. One that would imply awareness is an emergent, rather than immanent property of matter. Understandable but shallow imo.
Consciousness is not a state, it is a transition of state. A snapshot of someone's psyche would never produce the effect that we feel. The moment to moment static configuration of our neural network is not where we will find our 'person'. Rather sentience exists in the transition between these static moments. The transition is the conscience we experience.
@John T Correct. The statement was not made to encompass what Consciousness is. The statement was made to show the fallibility of human thinking and that people think of consciousness as a momentary state or snapshot. I propose the Consciousness is not those momentary snapshots but rather the transition between them. In a nutshell I feel that modern science is not looking in the right place.
To understand what panpsychism means, you'll need to understand that consciousness or experience is not the same as a particle like a photon or higgs. Panpsychism posits there is another fundamental property of matter that we haven't found using the standard model which gives this point of view experience. Logically, it makes no sense at all for a perceivably physical universe to give rise to any kind of subjective experience. A physical universe could only give rise to behaviors and patterns of matter, not an experience. If the subjective experience was limited to just physical matter, it is a near impossibility that we should be here right now. Why are you here right now, experiencing your thoughts and not mine, or another person's thoughts 1000 years ago? If everyone is conscience, why would you even need to perceive anything at all when you don't need to perceive others being conscious? The external universe does not need you to be there for other entities to be conscious...but you're here....right now...it makes no sense at all what so ever..
Good explanation Greg, assuming you are right of course! Also, of course the big question of why... I know a few theists are using panpsychism as new "evidence" to back up their claims but as it is literally impossible to test and experimentally evaluate the phenomenon it falls into the argument from ignorance and incredulity category. Naturalistically it could've been through abiogenesis but that only possibly explains how life could've originated naturally (and of course is in no way proven either) and doesn't explain consciousness but then we have evolution. Consciousness most likely began when animals such as jellyfish got thousands of neurons, around 580 million years ago and evolved from there. So that most likely explains the how. We of course don't know the why, maybe we will never know. Maybe there isn't a "why". I agree that it is mindboglingly inexplicable that we are here and sentient right now and somehow emerged from a stark universe of matter and energy but we did. All the ingredients are here and the laws of physics hold true so far. We know chance happens and is a thing. We know infinity is a thing. Those two combined open up the chance for anything but the bottom line is that we just don't know, yet.
Isn't it kinda weird to say that the universe isn't conscious when the ingredients of consciousness reside in it. That's like saying my veins don't carry blood because my bone marrow makes it
The idea of 'prototime'; or 'not yet time as we think of it' at the subquantum level, simply kicks the problem down one layer; you then get an infinite regress of proto-proto ... time. I'm not interested in making nice and being 'friendly ' to an essentially incoherent notion - Panpsychism. I used to be attracted to it as a teenager - but that's before I went to physics grad school. There is, as Feynman said, 'Plenty of room at the bottom [known layer of reality]'. But not for panpsychism. Which seems to me an attempt at an end-run round the failure of our wish for 'meaning', to mesh with what physics seems to be saying about the universe. I'll treat panpsychism as simply wrong, absent evidence to the contrary. 'Wishes' are not evidence.
Integrated information theory (IIT) is one of the few attempts to currently try to model consciousness mathematically - and it's eerily similar to panpsychism (C. Koch, Sci. Am. Mind, 2009, 20 (4), 16-19). The thing is, if you subscribe to _any_ version of materialism, you'll have to eventually accept some form or variation of panpsychism; guess Descartes' ghost is not as easy to exorcize as advertised, huh?
@Russell Spears Hmm... not quite. I subscribe to the Jaynesian view that stat mech entropy is just Shannon entropy - so that here the applied concept of "information" is very well-defined, abstract as it is. The big deal that Wheeler made with his 'it from bit', and the noise that Hawking et al. made with the so-called 'black hole information paradox' are really just speculations that oversell the significance of entropy to modern physics. The problem I have with IIT is that it's just a very crude way to quantify consciousness using some algorithms to compute entropy in a certain way. I don't much mind some spuriousness mentioned by critics that you can use the algorithms to conclude a CD is conscious, but rather that the whole thing is an _ad hoc_ quantification of a thing that you _guess_ is consciousness - so, you can't use it to learn about what it really _is_
@Russell Spears "A symbolic representation that may or may not coincide with our mathematical models" And that is underselling the whole scientific enterprise. Math is but the language of science, which we use to describe simulacra of reality from which we deduce facts and properties of the material world - so saying your simulacrum is wrong is not the same as "math doesn't apply here", or anything like that (though I guess you didn't mean it like that - I just assume someone may read it like that) "But I'm definitely interested in the embodied ontological status of information" There is none, and that's the point: information is not really the same thing as the on/off or flip-flop switches in your PC, it's a measure of how far from a purely random arrangement those things are at any given moment; matter of fact, this observation is one of the key reasons for me dismissing 'it from bit'
@Russell Spears Wow - thanks for the wall of text; summaries are, indeed, for pussies. Now check out this wall of text: "Take as an example a light switch and a dimmer switch" So discrete vs. continuous, huh? Nothing really groundbreaking in the transition - cf. part 1 and 2 of Shannon's 1948 paper; see if it introduces as much of a philosophical distinction as you suggest "the whole idea of "it from bit" is simply making a claim that information is prior to our material reality" Which is, of course, complete horseshit; people that go on to make claims like those really don't understand the core tenets of QM (or at least some of them - which is prolly the case with 'household' names Wheeler, Penrose, Deutsch, among others...) "these relatively outdated concepts of mass charge spin deals velocity etc.... Even inertia" Yeah, "outdated" - sure 😆 Do yourself a favor, kiddo, and don't pay no nevermind to the ramblings of loopists and stringers till they can actually establish a connection between them and reality "In fact I don't know of one scientific notion that does not have fundamental issues with it" I agree that the rapid growth of physical knowledge in the last century has prevented a smooth meshing of all the science produced so far - that's why the picture presented by GR, QM and all that seems so paradoxical and 'weird' - and the fringe theorists really haven't been doing much to help clarify things... "just because we can use mathematics to model the predictability of certain outcomes an experiment doesn't mean that we confuse that model with the actual underlying reality" Which, had you been paying _closer_ attention, is precisely what I did _not_ say: I said math is a language that describes and models _simulacra_ of reality, not reality itself (otherwise you could just program a GTA-like orgy in a PC, hit Enter and have it happen IRL) - other considerations/assumptions must be factored in to translate simulacrum-information into reality-prediction. In the end, though, it comes down to monism vs. dualism: in the case of the former, plus materialism, there's no escape, you can't hide your humanity behind the uncertainty of quanta - in the latter, a material position may not be sustainable, but even there we're not necessarily doomed to lose math because it's a broad language that includes very fundamental ingredients like logic
I'm pretty sure there isn't a successful theory on Quantum gravity yet, so rejecting panpsychism on the grounds that it doesn't mesh with any of the popular quantum gravity theories, ( or at least which ever one she's promoting), smacks a little too hard of bias imho. Completely unthinkable that whichever quantum theory she's thinking of would be wrong and panpsychism right..right?
Why not just say you have no idea... we dont understand consciousness and trying to figure it out is like being inside of a box and trying to see with your eyes what the outside of the box looks like. Materialism can only take us so far.
This is the most common disconnect in my mind, trying to combine hard math based stuff with fuzzy feelings. "There is life energy in everything" "Cool. How many Joules and where does it comes from with abiogenesis?" "You know... the cosmos,. with quantum spirits or something. Quantum means everything is connected so... telepathy maybe?"
@@bf3brian, I like the way you make a point! Maths I agree is a map, in that it uses symbols and concepts to represent external realities. However it also reveals such breathtaking beauty and mystery, such as that expressed in Euler's identity. The more it sinks in and is understood, the greater the sense of ethereal and profound wonder.
1. My opinion based strictly on subjective criteria is that time is not linear. Linear time is a construct, but I don't know if that means that Time doesn't exist. I believe there is room for other concepts.
I love you Big Think, but this one really let me down. It is obvious that this lady doesn’t even know what she talking about- she even states that she doesn’t understand the claims of panpsychism. Also her demeanor was really off putting throughout this video. It’s obvious she wants to discredit it, even though there is no current science that has ability to credit or discredit this notion. And in some deep intuition, we all can feel it’s true potential in reality. Most people in the world have a sense of God or Spirit- most of us have an inner knowing that consciousness is not confined to complex organisms. It is fundamental. At least that’s my take on it.
Modern physics seems to contradict consciousness, not just panpsychism. But we know that consciousness exists. I think time being emergent doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. But also, I think consciousness can exist non-temporally.
I think you are getting caught up in the weeds. Poetry is better to resolve such a contradiction. The universe itself is alive and every emergence of animate life therein, is an expression of that life, just at a different level of description. Systems theory explains how emergence is part of the fabric of nature.
If time is not fundamental and instead an emergent process.. how would a fundamental particle like a string vibrate? Surely a vibration is a change in structure over time?
Perhaps the vibration itself is emergent. The string changes from one condition to the next and our inferior temporal minds interpret these sudden and consistent changes as 'vibration?'
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.
Let me get this straight, philosophers must modify their musings about consciousness to corroborate the prevailing wisdom of physicists. However, physicists are under no obligation to modify their musings about physics to corroborate the prevailing wisdom of philosophers. Why? Perhaps because empiricism, which was developed by philosophers, is what she prefers. A great deal of objectivity, impartiality, and reasonability here.
The thought process is easier to understand when zooming out. First, however, it's important to point out that sentience may come in many forms, and that time and distance are both relative to our perception of it (which has been and continues to be selected for naturally). Also, keep in mind that nature's selection processes involve selecting for inter-species relationships of all kinds, and those relationships are very intelligently molded to exploit resources efficiently. On a macro level, all the life on a planet is even being "naturally selected" for its ability to survive to some extent once the planet becomes unlivable, and on an even more macro level, all the life within a galaxy/cluster/supercluster is being naturally selected for their ability to unite and direct resources intelligently. That "life" doesn't have to be like us or even what we'd classify as life, as long as it directs resources more intelligently than other groups. Now if we assume that the universe is infinite in time and scale (which is heavily debated but bear with me), we can then assume that this process has been taking place forever and will continue taking place forever. If that's true, eventually all the sentience in a portion of the universe will become so united and skilled at directing information that it experiences something similar to what we experience; if not exactly what we experience. Keep in mind that the individual beings within this system are so united in their objective that they would eventually lack any individual sentience. Similar to the neurons in our minds, these beings' purposes would be singular, but the systems they serve would not be. Similar to how our subconscious minds use experiences and emotions to motivate us to pursue procreation and security, perhaps these systems of systems of individuals would learn to perceive themselves in certain ways that would increase their probabilities of successfully out-competing each other. They'd likely form relationships of all forms; similar to the animals and people we see. Infinitely, this would continue on; individual sentience would be sacrificed for collective unity and that collective unity would eventually create more sentience.
It looks like emerging mind-properties out of emerging mind-properties of populations. From the micro to the macro but probably also from macro to micro as retroactive constrain. Then there is a tension between the one and the multiple. Does the individual really exist? Or it is also a population with an emerging mind-properties? Even our body is a colony of other beings and as "individual" we are part of other populations.
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?
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 :D
Consciousness doesn't need spacetime and objects to exist. Consciousness is another view of property, and it exists as long as property exists. If properties (characteristics of things) don't exist then nothing exists.
Bad arguments topped by whopping unexplained metaphysical claims. I hope we can all learn from this: Read books and think for yourself, so you won't look this foolish. As soon as you think you have found some truth, try to see your arguments from the outside. There is always a counterargument that you haven't thought about.
Okay here me out- instead of using words like “consciousness,” “experience,” “feel,” “subjects,” use words like “independence” and “interiority.” It’s not that fundamental particles have an “experience” it’s that even without anyone observing, an electron has its own “in itselfness” independent from everything else in the universe.
i'm almost certainly misunderstanding something (i should/will probably watch this a few more times), but doesn't something like the double-slit experiment give at least the possibility of temporal & non-temporal information and/or experience occurring at fundamental levels of the universe (since it can conform to both rationality alone and then irrationality via an observer)? ...watched a few more times and, ya, i think i'm not really understanding the panpsychists point of view. oh well. still fun to think about.
oh, i did want to add though, i disagree somewhat significantly with certain assumptions the doctor is making about consciousness; in particular, that time is a prerequisite for consciousness. sure, we can only understand ourselves through time (as we have to use our brains to form the necessary ideas and all that jazz); however, as with the double-slit experiment above, observation (and thus consciousness) begins collapsing the wave function immediately (granted, it does takes time for the full collapse to happen, but once the effect is underway it cannot be undone -- as far as i can tell with a bit of research). the amount of time it takes to collapse the function is effectively inconsequential for our purposes -- it's the fact that it collapses and WILL collapse that is important. again, i'm most certainly out of my depth, but fun fun
Flashback: Ouch! I should never have signed up for that sophomore level class without taking the prerequisite. *** But I was entertained while I doodled. ***
That was super interesting. I'll check out whether she or someone else has written anything more about the relationship of panpsychism and modern physics. Consciousness and time are the most puzzling aspects of our world.
It seemed like a very surface-level analysis, using vague language which does not really help, There is lack of paperwork on her part too. We did not even give a definition to what is considered consciousness for the concept to not "match with physics", physics in the end ought to match with the logical patterns of reality and even be harmonious to the subjective patterns of experience. There is a logic behind everything as well as an unbounded nature of freedom. Bothways can work if we figure out how and there is the truth.
Weird, chalmers for example claims that consciousness may be fundamental LIKE how space and time are fundamental. People don't disagree with the fundamentality of space and time.
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.
Atoms are tools that molecules use to effect their intentions. Things can happen randomly, but to happen in one direction, molecules need to know what they want.
I think this is only a problem if you are defining consciousness as the separate self. The sense of being a subject separate from the object. It is possible to experience states of experience through meditation and yogic practices that removes the sense of "I" and shows you that the true nature of your subjective experience is a state of emptiness in which phenomena arise. The sense of being an "I" is just one of those many phenomena being experienced within that emptiness. I don't believe that consciousness is fundamental but I think it emerges from a more fundamental state that is also intangible but has no qualities. There is no mind, no self, darkness, silence, no sense of time or space. Basically you can imagine reality as being in a state of deep sleep or having an experience of nonexistence. The fact that we can sit here and know what is like to exist implies there is something that it is like to not exist. Just like how light implies darkness. And within this state of emptiness different types of phenomenon including the illusion of consciousness have the potential to manifest.
2:34 she argues that consciousness is tied to temporal phenomena and then says "it [consciousness] causes events in the mind" really messes up her position. Otherwise, reasonable position overall.
I don't get it. We know our consciousness is a function of our brains. When the brain stops functioning, consciousness stops. Is it really so complicated?
Actually, that is incorrect. The 'mind' is a function of our brain, not consciousness - and we know that consciousness does continue after our body and our brain stops.
Well, yes. Because we don't know WHY consciousness is a function of our brains. Especially since they're made of the same stuff as everything else. We can understand how complex chemical interactions can result in systems that exhibit lifelike behavior, yes, but what specifically gives rise to our actual inner awareness is the mystery.
Given that she hasn't even defined consciousness, I struggled with her whole argument. I was also shocked by her very judgemental approach. So much for science...
Because spatial and temporal can be relationally measured through correlation, anything in scientific research is correlation/relational based rather than intrinsically based. Panpsychism can't be observed/measured in that same way. They don't conflict with quantum theory.
That's funny, because what she says shows she didn't get the point, and probably never would unless by having a direct experience. Taking the example of Buddhism, or non duality, the claim is that consciousness comes first, without objective qualities. Objects come by "separating" this consciousness, every object only existing relative to an other one. Physics itself being an object in consciousness, existing only relatively to an other object (people's minds), there's no way to suppress all emergent phenomenon from it by analyzing it from inside the system, relatively to an other part of the system. So yeah, the claim is actually unprovable, by definition making it non scientific. By the way, all science and physics rely on the premise that the physical world exists outside consciousness, which is itself an unprovable axiom. There's too much scientists (and people at large) viewing science as a way to prove absolute truth, making it an implicit religion while it should be seen as what it is, a great social construct and a tool to enhance the world. Recognizing this is life changing when you've been oblivious to it your whole life.
Get Donald Hoffman on the show. He is not a panpsychism proponent, but his theory of concsciouss agents is fascinating. He ahs a TED talk about it, check it out.
The things this doctor says about time are dubious because it's quite clear that consciousness perceives time in different ways, so there isn't just one objective version of time that we can all agree upon. If you meditate correctly, consciousness simply stands alone, and it's not formulating any notions about time. When you put your hand on a hot stove for 15 seconds, the time is going to seem a lot longer than the time you spend petting your cat for 15 seconds. If you could reach the speed of light, time wouldn't exist at all, because that's the limit of speed in the universe and time revolves around it, not vice versa. So, with time being such a flexible concept, I don't see how it isn't a construction contingent on how we perceive it.
I think she misunderstands panpsychism. The basic idea of panpsychism is that the elements of consciousness or mind is a part of the fundamental structure of reality. Contra her assertion, I do not believe that, as a panpsychist, one must posit fundamental conscious SUBJECTS of experience. I think that the protopanpsychism she posits is compatible with panpsychism.
What topics should we tackle next?
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The age of Aquarius that were in right now
Really enjoyed your take here, Dr. Schneider - thanks a lot for considering the matter so carefully. I would just politely add that a lot of the modern panpsychism movement seems to have grown out of ongoing problems with explaining human consciousness, rather than trying to reconcile quantum mechanics and general relativity. (Postulating consciousness as a fundamental property of matter, much as electromagnetism was eventually accepted in physics as a fundamental interaction.) It's quite tough at this point in our development to imagine how panpsychism's claims would even be tested experimentally in physics or neuroscience, let alone verified. But at least in trying to explain consciousness, if nothing else, panpsychism is a fun alternative model at the moment to the standard emergent explanations. Thanks again for the interesting thoughts.
I know I’m a year late but do you have any videos on panpsyism? Or do you plan on making any one day? Would love to see your take on it, huge fan.
Ooo shiiit it's ex
Indeed a pleasant surprise, seeing my favourite depression turtle out in the wild
My contention there is, is how ANY claim about consciousness can be tested or verified, when consciousness is inherently unobservable (because it is observation itself)? It may seem safe to assume that others are conscious in the same way you are, but that's just what it is: an assumption. Sure, we can observe things like brain waves, but that's far from observing someone else's subjective experience. Can we extend that logic to AI? How could we know? Sure, we have things like the Turing test, but that's not proof, it's a judgment made observing behavior, which, since "free will" is a logical impossibility... It would all come down to programming. I came to panpsychism myself simply because it's the only viable alternative I've seen to materialism, which... My problem there is that there's no logical process by which strictly material reagents result in an immaterial/abstract product. It's not just that we haven't discovered how it happens; that's like saying we just haven't discovered the logical process by which 0+0=1
I do think she's misrepresenting panpsychism here, too. It's not that what she's talking about isn't panphsycism, but that it's only one theory: it's kind of an umbrella term for a broad school of thought. Personally... Frankly, I'm not even sure which named branch best fits me, but what makes the most sense to me is that consciousness is a fundamental property of reality that experiences the physical (panexpirientialism, maybe?). Or rather, the potential for conscious experience is a fundamental quality of the universe, but is only expressed when there's something there to experience. This would help explain whether inanimate objects are conscious or not: well, sort of: there's something there, but nothing is being experienced when the material is static. Then again, those things aren't truly static on an atomic level, so who can say?
ah yes, my favourite turtle!
Kurzgesagt should to do a video on panpsychism. I need the fundamental elements of consciousness explained with animated birds.
Facts
It's crazy I was just watching Kurzgesagt and then saw this comment.
Me too 😂😂
👌👍
They completely missed the point in their video of consciousness. Before they talk about panpsychism they'd first have to understand what's meant with consciousness.
I think it is a bit premature to rely on these quantum gravity ideas to attack this sort of philosophical question. They are completely theoretical and have absolutely no experimental support at the moment. It makes any argument based on them extremely fragile, and a bit uninteresting. It isn't really using "modern physics" to attack the question, it is "speculative future physics".
Yep. Glad someone said it. Also, is speculation that fundamental reality transcends space and time somehow less radical than panpsychism?! Lol
I see your point, however i think that it significantly weakens panpsychism since whether or not it fails would depend on future scientific consensus, which makes panpsychism on shaky ground. I’m saying this as a person inclined towards panpsychism btw
@@bananabreadman55quantum gravity is under equally shaky ground using your heuristic.
this! thank you!!
Just because consciousness exists in time doesn't mean that it doesn't also exist outside of it as well.
How would that be consciousness?
: /
You might be right. It may well exist outside of time. How do you propose to test your assumption and prove it?
@@TheTruthKiwi There is most likely no way to prove that assumption. If a concept cannot be proven, is it unworthy of consideration?
@@nerosuperstardom It is absolutely fine to consider it but one shouldn't accept it as fact until it has been shown or proven to be possible. Until then it is just unfalsifiable hypothesis.
@@TheTruthKiwi "
...Am I the only one who feels like this lady only recognizes one single kind of panpsychist belief?
No, you're definitely not.
Listening to this I couldn't help but think the whole time 'this lady doesn't seem to know what she's talking about, actually...' I'd like to know where she got her 'doctorate' from. lol
From the viewpoint of panpsychism, starting with "am I the only one, who..." 😅 is very dodgy. OFCOURSE YOU ARE! AND SO AM I!
No, you’re not the only one. I didn’t even realise she was talking about panpsychism in her description.
I'm with you. The issues she raised may apply to some variants of panpsychism (like cosmopsychism for instance) but not others. Micropsychism for example (as I understand it) believes that space, time, and matter are all fundamental - alongside consciousness.
Getting a physicist to understand consciousness requires a level of consciousness that they usually don’t have
I watched the whole thing, and I still have no idea what this was all about... But hey, go you!
so apparently everything in the universe has consciousness except you
Ditto
@@Едентийф
Why do you think it's nonsense?
She didn't actually say anything so yer gucci
Same here 😔
Personally, as someone who subscribes to panpsychism, I don't see how it necessitates time and space not being fundamental. Honestly, the number of different ways that you can imagine pan-psychic understandings of the universe means that you should really specify which versions you think are untenable.
We have no memories of ourselves being 2 years old, nevertheless we were conscious, we simply didn't record memories. Also, the fact that we can't imagine experience without time only means we lack imagination
Or we are trapped in this dimension
I mean, almost by definition you can't imagine experiences you didn't have. It's like saying you can't imagine a new color. Well, the types of "integrated" experiences we have are predicted of the type of physical configuration we find ourselves in.
That being said. People do report having experiences where their sense of time seems to drop somehow. Those are reported by meditators and psychonauts, there might have something to it. They also seem to be able to project higher order hyperbolic geometries in 3D visual field while using DMT.
The thing that botters me is how radically different experiencial domains are. Like smell is something completely different from vision. That makes you wonder. What kinds of dimensions of mental experiences we are missing out.
Also, in which sense is a smell something spaciotemporal. You can locate the source of smell but that seems like another type of qualia on top of the smell itself. Like smell is a sense datum and his location in your world simulation another. In that sense experience seems more like numbers. You could have an instance of three objects but that doens't mean that the number three is a spaciotemporal concept.
I have memories young as 3 yr old
Wait...how is panpsychism a problem for physics again?
a single neuron doesn't have memories, but a network of them does. It's called Emergent Properties.
same thing with all fundamental particles in the universe.
Could you please explain why Emergent Properties emerge?
@@michaelwu7678 there are lots of reasons. But for example, multicellular organisms are an emergent property of single cells on an intrinsic level.
Another way to look at it could be like how ants can act in phenomenal synchronicity to form multipurpose shapes and structures.
There's not really any debating that emergence doesn't exist in our physically measurable world
Aoeui I gotcha. But why do emergent properties emerge? How do we explain how something seemingly comes out of nothing in this manner?
@@michaelwu7678 that question, sir, currently has not received deep enough research to have an answer.
Unfortunately lol
@@michaelwu7678 It might be worthwhile that you consider Game of Life as an example. I suppose you can say that existence of some rules may lead into emergent properties when these rules are actuated. But you can easily make another rules for some other Game of Life, and you would not see anything emerge out of that. For example, if all atoms produced by this universe were completely non reactive, there would never be any sort of life, everything would remain inert, simple and lifeless.
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.”
I looked for her published papers. None of them related to psycics. This explains why she makes no sense.
Guessing you mean physics - I would be worried if her papers related to psychics!
Panpsychism makes much more sense within the framework of a process-relational ontology.
Whitehead FTW
yep
...Oh my God. Wow! I was WONDERING whether anyone else had combined the two! Like, I came to panpsychism before I even knew the word through force of pure, anxious obsession over the hard-problem of consciousness. But thinking about what that would mean for inanimate objects, I was like... Well, with a static object, nothing is happening, there's nothing to be experienced. That led me to the conclusion that experience is contingent upon change. I stumbled upon process theory later, and wondered if anyone had thought that way. That's what you're talking about, right?
@@Hakajin Ready for a round 2?
Theorem:
Electrical activity is a necessary condition for cost-efficient molecular exchange of information.
Proof:
1. Existence
Since EEG works, as does MRI, the brain must employ electric signals, hence streams of electric potential changes, since it is consistently and measurably embedded in a standard model framwork.
2. Uniqueness
The quantum of electric potential is precisely the electron.
3. Efficiency
Polarization in the neuronal axons happens due to influx of sodium into potassium channels.
Excess electrons are carried over.
The energy required only depends on the local existence of these materials, and on chemical mobility via ATP, which is recycled in the Krebs cycle.
Now, try to bring in that electrons are the observed interferences of a homogenous potential wave that loops in time (a consistent embedding of John Wheelers one electron universe in a wave formalism).
And ponder how that relates to the Heisenberg principle and consciousness...
“If you have much of a focus on observation and experiment you run the risk of ignoring the role that deep thought and re - imagining has always played in scientific progress”
Philip Goff - Professor of Philosophy, Durham University
Imagination that ends in observation and demonstration.
@@bhs055 Those two things derived from imagination, then.
I think the problem is seeing the human experience in a vacuum. If we have subjective experience, and intelligence, that means subjective experience and intelligence are inherent properties of the universe. They cannot exist apart from it . And as far as quantum physics versus classical physics, it’s not about how Objects relate to each other, it’s about how one single object relates to the immediate space around it , and how then that space in between affects the shape of time as it relates then to the next object
Adam Augustus in other words, If we view ourselves as part of the universe and not separate from the universe, then the explanation of everything is in our very own minds. Just part of a giant self similar pattern or a simple replication of everything
Adam Augustus Well its interesting , when we close our eyes and sleep at night and dream, we are still observing. And we see the same form of images when our eyes are open. So most likely we are looking inward when we think we’re living looking outward and we cannot take our perspective for granted . But I agree, consciousness transcends the flesh because if it didn’t , The first conscious form of Life would take all consciousness with it when it died
Adam Augustus The point is that in a sense, we should look at dreams and being awake as common unified experiences, not as a separate experiences. If we don’t control our thoughts at night, most likely we don’t control our thoughts in the day. And our lack of control implies that something bigger is working through us and that we are a part of something bigger than we think. This is why I always say one aspect of reality, or the universe , represents all aspects of both
@@MrSanford65 Woah Donza, I rarely have the feeling to read someone else's ideas and just agree line after line. Very good.
You express yourself quite well, congrats. Don't lose your time with this "Adam" guy, the dude has a simplistic way to interpret things, it's quite obvious.
But tell me something - "consciousness transcends the flesh because if it didn’t , The first conscious form of Life would take all consciousness with it when it died"
... what do you mean by these lines? Can you be more specific?
Also I want to point out that i dont really think that "the first conscious form of life" is a real thing, k?
Life in a large sense of the word goes from Now and regrets infinitely AND gradually until it comes back to be some chemical compounds loose in the ocean... just imagine a Forest. In which point you can say that a group of trees is OFICIALLY a forest?
Same with life. There was not a point where we would find the "first conscious life form". It's gradual.
Another example: imagin 0.000% to 100% (one hundred being now and 0 being any chemical compound before becoming organic, or having Carbon attched to it)
Life in the real sense of the word in strict definition could be considered the 0.001% but wouldn't be intuitive to consider that this "life form" had died ay any point, since the "gore" characteristics of death would still inexist at this simple level of complexity.
But anyway
Another question (btw, im still searching for a positioning on this one, so im making my research) - have you ever found any good reason to believe that "Meaning" is a big thing in the Universe? If so, why? Can you fully justifiy your answer?
Note that by "Meaning" i refer to the most profound and broad sense of this word - literally how any Organic Structure (since I don't have any good reason to believe that non-living structures could add Meaning to their experience) Perceives and Labels their experience, inserting Meaning at them.
Waiting for your answer.
tks
Like/Dislike and Comment; repeat Like/Dislike and Comment; repeat By The end of the first life being the end of consciousness, To put it another way, There are no two copies of human beings so there should be no two copies of consciousness . It should’ve ended with the termination of the first flesh, Never to be experienced again . But the conscious experience continues on interrupted. It doesn’t die with the flesh And has an eternal abstract quality to it that is like nothing else on earth. The same conscious experience I’m having now, is the same one Christopher Columbus had. You got a look at experience as something in and of it’s self separate. No two human beings are Exactly identical with the same identity, but the conscious experience is something that transcends all forms of life from humans down to the amoeba. See, it’s not how consciousness expresses itself externally to other beings, it’s how consciousness expresses itself to itself or to its host. I think how consciousness relates to itself or to its host is the common transcendent experience that does not die, Whether rowing a boat, or in a coma, or even when the heart stops beating. Does the universe have meaning? I’ll put it this way, every thought you have is real because nature /reality cannot falsify itself . So your memories, illusions, and fantasies all have true meaning it’s just how you symbolically interpret them . I think the brain is just a way of transferring consciousness, but I think meaning and life are in the field, the spaces in between objects. But at some point we can never know because whatever is at our core projects out so we can only go back but so far before self awareness cancels itself out . Also , Non-organic entities and dead bodies Have the exact same general properties, so its not beyond the realm of possibilities that all non-organic entities in the universe we’re once host for life.
One aspect a reality has got to equal all aspects, because there’s no vacuum in nature to separate categories
I'm a Christian so I'm obviously not panpsychist, but I get the impression that she heard the idea and immediately came up with a retort to it. Not that she's dumb about it, but she comes at it with a bit of an attitude (I recognize I often do) in assuming that the problem she has isn't circulated in the groups of people who hold the idea she's criticizing.
If, as a Christian you,
P1; believe God is an Infinite Mind or in other words a consciousness expressing itself in infinitely many ways.
P2; believe God is all (which not all Christians do) this is to say that everything is an emanation of the divine.
P3; believe that what emanates from a source carries the properties of said source, this is to say reflects its nature.
C1;Then it would appear to me that you would fall into the category of some form of Pansychism.
Or to put into clearer terms, If God is all and God is conscious then all is conscious (unless God is not all conscious but maybe only partially so, like islands of consciousness awaking to existence such as you and I). However, if Mind is one of the infinite attributes of God and all his attributes express itself as existent in infinitely many ways then the consciousness of God is infinitely existing. Which this just leads to more rabbit holes to explore but would suggest that all things which are an expression of the divine would also express itself in consciousness ranging from infinitely close to complete unconscious to infinitely close to perfect/complete consciousness. This is to Say the Infinite mind of God would be pure potentiality. But would this exclude the mind of God existing as Actual rather than merely as Potential though? Or could time (the infinite now) be the dividing line between the potentiality of Gods mind and the actuality of it? Here is what I mean. Everything in the future is still potential, it can exist in infinitely many different ways. But at the defining moment of now what is potential becomes what is actual and hence we can know it, or have knowledge. Hence the mind of God can become actualized in the same sense through the eternal now. This reminds me of Genesis 1:3 Vayomer Elohim, Yehi Aur vi-Yehi Aur. To speak or think God, Let it be/exist Light, and it did be/exist light. God made us in his image as is said, Let us make man in our Tselem (image), after our likeness. Does God have a 3D image? How can the infinite have a certain height, width, and depth and bound by a certain shape? If it is an absurdity to attribute a finite body to the infinite then we must ask "What is the Image we are made in?" To answer, we may want to first ask who is here in this verse in the Garden with him? Proverbs 8 tells us Wisdom was with God when he created the world. This is the image we are made in, as a reflection of the divine mind. H-Sapien Meaning Wise man. It is the Sophia, our Philo-Sophia being the "Love of Wisdom" or Philosophy. Since God is not corporeal and has no such body this sort of language is meant to be taken figuratively and not literally. Such as when God sits or rises, or moves, or has an outstretched arm, etc... These things are not meant to say that God was walking around and decided to sit down for a while. Rather this expresses the permanence and immovability of God. That God Sits in the Heavens is to say that Gods position of authority in the universe is from our perspective unchanging. So here in Genesis we see God speak. Yet God has no such lips nor is there someone external to God who can hear. As it says, I am God and there is None else. Or again Hear o Israel, the LORD our God The LORD is one. So even speaking there is none to hear so what is being expressed here is different than the expression of thought from one mind to another as we have in speech/language. God here isn't speaking from non existent lips. The word Vayomer has other interpretations which may provide a closer understanding of what is meant. Namely the concept of thought. Hence, God thought at this definite moment in Genesis 1:3 and it became or was. Hence Gods thought went from potentiality to actuality in a moment of time, as it is when God thought "let it be" that it was at that moment actually existing.
Granted not all Christians do believe in these presuppositions but it appears to me that most do. So if we are careful with our words then by definition the Christian Position would appear to me as a Panpsychist view. At least in some potential ways as the word Pan means all, and if we are saying all is Mind (psyche), then it appears to me we are saying there is an infinite mind that is ALL. Hence GOD. This would seem to flow from our previous understanding of Vayomer, as all things would be nothing more than the thought of God being actualized. It is as if God captured the whole of our experience/existence in a single perfect thought expressed in the words "Let it be". I would personally be careful though as to say God "Thinks". This may be used as a close approximation to what we mean but I would be careful of putting human qualities on the Divine as if we are the epitome of perfection. If God thinks it is so far radically removed from our notions of thought that it may not be useful to call it such other than as a close approximation/attempted description of the ineffable.
a rock's behavior is one which they literally stand still and immovable, when you press on them they press back to hold their position, therefore that is a behavior and thus they are to some level conscious of you pressing on them.
The notion that moving things that interact in more complicated ways are alive, is just a notion or an illusion emergint from our brain, it has nothing to do with awareness as a concept besides that it is just that... a perception.
You can effectively see this when attending to people who somehow got damaged clinically in such a way that we consider them unconscious because they do not move as much even though people who have come-out of it are mentioning into their reports that they indeed were conscious albeit sometimes conscious of different things than just surroundings and so on.
The concept of "stream of consciousness" is actually pretty interesting, implying that whatever we are as consciousness is simply perceiving a stream of information which are a cause-and-effect stream that goes to consciousness, this starts the "hard problem" of consciousness where the more you dig... the more you dig.
Here you go. Up if you get it. Seems like "clever" scientists do not.
2. Physics doesn't even mesh with physics. Relativity v. Quantum theory. They tolerate each other within an uneasy truce at best.
That's my understanding. If I'm wrong just explain, please. No need to be mean.
Good point, I agree.
Agree, and would further suggest: quantum theory v. quantum theory.
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?
I mean, panpyschism as I understand it doesn't maintain that a Higgs boson can be happy or sad. The ideas come back to awareness on a pretty simple level. I mean real simple. There's no claim to it that the boson has its own "will". It's a bit more in line with the ideas of reality as a sort of information-based hierarchical construct. And there are several of these.
And it makes sense. If you look at object-oriented programming, they use classes of objects to reduce memory overhead. Each electron is identical as to properties, but has a unique quantum state. This would be a way to build a reality with a fundamental limit on computational capability. And no, this would not necessitate a simulation-based reality (though it is consistent with it).
So, the real question is whether or not consciousness is emergent: The answer is clearly yes on the human level, whether you approach it from reductionism, theism, deism, or just about any variant of those. We know that our "classical physics" experience is emergent from quantum phenomena. So the panpsychism variant referred to as constitutive panpsychism is pretty consistent with even reductivism, as the notion is that the components (term used loosely) are either inherent in or arise from material components.
Given our human tendencies, I can understand the desire to parse this out to the extreme and eliminate even the hint of spiritualism from any scientific study. It generally helps keep us honest. But in this case, as long as we keep our feet on the metaphorical ground, I tend to think this is worth a look. Worst case, it doesn't come to anything other than a philosophical footnote.
She claimed consciousness "causes" events in the mind to happen, which I don't think anyone is claiming. In fact I think panpsychists believe the human body could do everything it does, including thinking, making choices and acting on them without consciousness, and consciousness (the inner experience) is actually unnecessary.
You are correct.
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.
Well written 🙂
Empty assertions.
Besides the more closely you look, the more clearer it becomes that consciousness *is* it's contents. It is a sequence of qualia. In a way Buddhists knew that thousands of years ago.
@@MrCmon113 The closer you look the more of "you" disappears. People mistake their life's sequence of qualia as their personal identity but no matter what story is being told by the mind, there is a fundamental unchanging nature in everyone's experience. What is left when the personal story of the mind is no longer there? Awareness, absolutely empty yet infinitely whole, unrestricted by any concept, untouched by experience. This isn't a belief you have to see it within your own experience. Once you see it you will see how ridiculously obvious it is. Hidden in plain sight this entire life.
I'm glad to hear a professional taking about this topic seriously. However, I think it's possible she may have a misunderstanding about what she's discussing around 2:03. I don't know about panpsychism as much, but in regards to Buddhist philosophy, they do not believe the fundamental level of reality is made up of "subjects of experience", but instead is what they would call empty awareness. My understanding is that this empty awareness is the base of consciousness, and consciousness is the only way anything is experienced. Also, this awareness is dimensionless and eternal; essentially it is pure potential. A good anaolgy is that awareness is like a movie screen and everything experienced in it (emotions, sensations, the universe) are all the light that's projected onto the screen to create a movie. This analogy also helps clarify what is meant when people say the self is an illusion, because we identify with what's on the screen (the movie), but what we all truly are is the screen itself. Even when the movie ends the screen is still there waiting to take on the next movie.
@@shouvikb Practicing meditation and listening to teachers are the best things you can do. The only way to really understand selflessness is to experience it directly, which mediation will help you do. For a good introduction on how to meditate I would google "Sam Harris how to meditate" and the top result should be a blog that guides you through the basics. I'd also recommend searching for "Guided Meditation with Sam Harris Long Version" and using that as an audio guide to start. He also briefly covers the idea of the self being an illusion in that. Lastly, I would recommend listening to the lecture "Alan Watts: The World As Self Part 1". Those few resources will give you a good quick overview of the types of things I mentioned above. Hope that helps!
I feel like this talk would've benefited from a more in-depth introduction to the topic. Maybe present an alternative or orthodox view that contradicts panpsychism, so comparisons become easier?
I couldn't follow along because of how stressed out totally pissed off she is. Is she the freakout interviewer from a major media outlet? Someone much calmer should've been the one to discuss this, not her!
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.
Clear as mud.
Sadly, I agree. Space and time being emergent phenomena is questionable. Are they even physical phenomena? Objects (electrons, quarks, photons, and the like) in space and time are. Kant's premise is much more clear and reasonable: space and time are mental apriori's, mental constructs just like causality, not necessarily a part of physical reality.
This video does not do the panpsychist view any justice. She deals with quite a Strawman version of panpsychism. There are many variation of the panpsychist view, many of which are compatible with modern physics.
Literally no one claims space and time are emergent
The flaw in her logic was saying that consciousness is a temporal phenomenon. There is no proof that is a true statement at this time. There is no proof that it is false as well and that is why the theory is a valid field of investigation. But to claim it’s nonsense based on an assumption is not science.
Well said.
Read Annaka Harris' ( Sam Harris' wife) book on conciousness. It explores this idea more carefully.
Are you claiming this wasn’t a careful presentation? What was missing?
Am I the only one inclined to believe this was not a convincing arguement?
...This is an extremely limited take on panpsychism.
To start out with, the point that it's unverifiable: this is true. It's also true of every other theory on consciousness, because consciousness is inherently unobservable, by fact that it's observation itself. Sure, it may seem like a safe assumption that other people are conscious like you are, but that's just what it is: an assumption. You can look at brain scans, but that's far from experiencing someone else's objective experience. Even if you could look at a monitor where what they're seeing is displayed (which we actually do have some limited capability for), how do you know that they're "seeing" it in the same way you are? What about AI? We have things like the Turing test, but, since everything comes down to programming, that's still only an inference based on observable behavior.
Then the question is, why complicate things? But it's really not complicating things at all: I arrived at panpsychism not by its own merits (actually I'd never heard the word at the time), but because I realized that there's no logical process by which material reagents result in an immaterial/abstract product. To say that we just haven't figured it out yet is like saying we just haven't figured out the logical process by which 0+0=1.
The view that the material is inherently conscious is only one version of panpsychism; it's actually a broad school of thought. My own view is that the potential for consciousness is a fundamental part of reality, but subjective experience only occurs when there's something to be experienced. When there is material to be experienced, that material probably needs to be in motion, changing over time and exchanging material with its environment, because... Well, the video did get it right that experience is temporal.
Interesting points. It’s awhile since you wrote this. Your second main para; are you saying panpsychism is a solution to the mind/body problem - ergo dualism?
I was excited to watch this video when i got the notification, and I'm now quite disappointed with the incoherent content, and lack of substance.
as you should be, this was trash
Jasper, and clearly lack of understanding from you.
BIG THINK is about questioning your beliefs, laying edge cases, and making you think just about anything even remotely interesting.
@@Chuck.1715 So... next up flat-earthers and phrenologists?
Agreed! This video was mostly about how enraged someone can get & how well they can come close to yelling hysterically.
@@Chuck.1715 this Think wasn't big enough. That's my point. The thoughts were medium at best
I’m only kinda a panpsychist, but I think there’s some flaws in this theory if panpsychism so it almost seems like a straw man.
I believe that consciousness is innate to the universe. Now this doesn’t mean that individual particles have subjective experience. Consciousness is almost like gravity, a permeating force of the universe. Everything has the potential to become conscious, but to become conscious requires something essential: information.
Let’s take a rock for example. It has no organs, no method to sample the outside world nor process it. So it doesn’t think at all. Therefore there is nothing for consciousness to latch on to.
Now let’s imagine a fish. It has eyes to take in the light of the outside world, nerves to feel the flow of the water, and a brain to process this information. This brain is so simple, all it can do is keep itself alive. Look for the next meal. Find a mate to have offspring. But deep down, it still feels that same “I am”. The “ego” of the fish doesn’t recognize this though.
Now imagine you. You most likely have all the same things as these animals. Sight, smell, taste, hearing, and touch. But you have something special, something that goes beyond that. Maybe it’s the ability to process abstract information, or the luxury to think past just survival. But you became aware of your own awareness.
Your brain got to a point where the information collection and processing could recognize there was an unforeseen variable. Something it couldn’t quite account for with its 5 senses. You realize that you are realizing things, and you aren’t quite sure how. That is consciousness, or what we usually refer to as “self awareness”. It is simply the information processor recognizing the spiritual variable of itself.
So panpsychism at its core really just postulates that consciousness is a spectrum, and the mechanisms available in your brain allow for self awareness. To put it simply: you are the universe recognizing itself.
I feel consciousness will ultimately turn out to be defined as our name for recognising emergent behaviour from certain kinds of feedback loops. Not really an interesting thing, but a very cool experience. Namaste :)
I response to panpsychism from someone who explicitly states she "doesn't understand" what panpsychism is
Ok.
You understand what you're talking about a lot more than I expected, given that title and your attitude. I would recommend working on your explanations until people can understand you without already being immersed in high-level philosophy of consciousness. You could try starting by laying out the Easy Problem and the Hard Problem, explaining physicalism, and then finally getting to panpsychism and its criticisms. I feel like that's the bare minimum for people to be able to follow along.
If you're as interested in receiving criticism as you seem to be in giving it, I think it would be better received by negating the first two sentences.
@@Mastermindyoung14 Thanks.
Mansplaining at its finest
yummypasta92 lol that’s not how it works
She's on the wrong track. The question of QM vs relativity is crucial to physics, but one's direct experience of the Essence of the mind (Rigpa), won't help answer that question, except to say that (per Shankara's Monism or Advaita Vedanta - the predicate of panpsychism), everything in the universe IS Pure Consciousness. (on all levels, micro and macro). One's apprehension of Pure Consciousness (Brahman), won't shed insight in the to precise rules of how particles can also be waves. It simply states that everything is Brahman (Sat-Chit-Ananda), discrete and continuously merged together (the Simultaneity of oneness and difference principle in Buddhism.). To experience That Pure Consciousness, the Substance (Spinoza's term), no problem. Access "Mahamritunjaya mantra - Sacred Sounds Choir" and listen to it for 5 min per day for at least two weeks. In due time your mind will transcend thought and tap into the Ground of Being,
Oh I get it, it threatens Her Magesty's world view, and it's therefore invalid.
Translation: If the vague spiritual thing is right, then it's right, but if it's wrong then it's wrong.
I don't understand anything she is saying but I'm glad she tried
She doesn't understand all that much of what she is saying either. She's using bigwordsalad to take a tribal position against an opposing view. Because "those other guys" are wrong.
i could be wrong but i believe that this is not actually panpsychism and that panpsychism is the belief that the whole universe is one consciousness not that every atom somehow individually has it's own consciousness
She showed her hand at the very end when she declared it a "problem" that panpsychism doesn't meld with physics. You have to be open to either amending your understanding of what might be the fundamental building blocks of the world, or you have to consider the idea that our understanding of physics doesn't hold all the answers to how life works. As Philip Goff puts it, Newtonian physics is excellent at quantifying things, but it can't tell you much of anything about what is actually is to be something, or to have the subjective experiences we all have all the time. So I think getting through to someone like the woman in this video is a bit like arguing with a religious fundamentalist. Things are the fundamentalist's way, and he won't budge to even consider that another point of view might even be possible.
I guess Chopra was unavailable this time? That was five minutes I'll never get back. Oh wait, time is a subjective experiential phenomenon so never mind.
Yep, never had it to lose hehee
Time isn't subjective, the experience of it is
@@omnishambles4477 Except the elapse of time changes with speed and gravity. This is to say it is ot absolute. But perhaps "subjective" is not the right word.
@@brendarua01 It is an absolute value, just not a constant. A clock may run differently when it's in orbit, but it'll be the same amount of change for every functional clock under the same gravity. (The change from speed is because of inertial gravity.)
What’s her evidence for saying consciousness is temporal? Many biocentrists will say that consciousness is non-temporal, hence the explanation for experiences that transcend space and time. She’s assuming consciousness is not fundamental!
If I were a pan-psychist, I would point out that humans do have the capacity to experience consciousness outside of time. It's commonly reported in deep meditative states or psychedelic trips. I think a better definition of consciousness is simply the exchange of information. You could say that brains are hyper-conscious because they are locuses of information exchange between our environments/senses and our bodies/DNA. By that definition, even a rock is conscious as the sun emits heat onto it's surface, because photons are a source of information.
Yes! A rock is conscious. Not only because of sun light argument. A geologist will provide you information about rock source, composition, etc. That rock stores information/energy and it will change function of surroundings (water, sun light, weather, etc). The only question is if that rock is self-conscious, like humans & etc are (some might argue that all humans are self-conscious:)). Most likely, the rock is not self-conscious. The assumption will be that rock has a smaller level of consciousness than humans (some might disagree that all humans have a greater level of consciousness than rocks:)).
Just because people have reported that they experienced consciousness outside of time doesn't mean they actually did. Also, by definition consciousness is the state of being aware of and responsive to one's surroundings so no, I'm afraid a rock is not conscious in any sentient way anyway.
@@TheTruthKiwi By A definition of consciousness, perhaps. One that would imply awareness is an emergent, rather than immanent property of matter. Understandable but shallow imo.
Consciousness is not a state, it is a transition of state.
A snapshot of someone's psyche would never produce the effect that we feel.
The moment to moment static configuration of our neural network is not where we will find our 'person'.
Rather sentience exists in the transition between these static moments. The transition is the conscience we experience.
So what you're saying is the painting is in the strokes not the picture.
I think Nietzsche said the exact same thing except in regards to power and phrased differently lol
@@jeffreymoffitt4070 Not the 'painting' but rather the intent of the artist, yes.
@@bmarq4402 he knew he was going to agree with me eventually. LOL
@John T Correct. The statement was not made to encompass what Consciousness is. The statement was made to show the fallibility of human thinking and that people think of consciousness as a momentary state or snapshot. I propose the Consciousness is not those momentary snapshots but rather the transition between them. In a nutshell I feel that modern science is not looking in the right place.
Now that humanity knows this piece of information, peace will roam the world forever!
Let our consciousness unite
To understand what panpsychism means, you'll need to understand that consciousness or experience is not the same as a particle like a photon or higgs. Panpsychism posits there is another fundamental property of matter that we haven't found using the standard model which gives this point of view experience.
Logically, it makes no sense at all for a perceivably physical universe to give rise to any kind of subjective experience. A physical universe could only give rise to behaviors and patterns of matter, not an experience.
If the subjective experience was limited to just physical matter, it is a near impossibility that we should be here right now. Why are you here right now, experiencing your thoughts and not mine, or another person's thoughts 1000 years ago? If everyone is conscience, why would you even need to perceive anything at all when you don't need to perceive others being conscious? The external universe does not need you to be there for other entities to be conscious...but you're here....right now...it makes no sense at all what so ever..
Good explanation Greg, assuming you are right of course! Also, of course the big question of why...
I know a few theists are using panpsychism as new "evidence" to back up their claims but as it is literally impossible to test and experimentally evaluate the phenomenon it falls into the argument from ignorance and incredulity category.
Naturalistically it could've been through abiogenesis but that only possibly explains how life could've originated naturally (and of course is in no way proven either) and doesn't explain consciousness but then we have evolution. Consciousness most likely began when animals such as jellyfish got thousands of neurons, around 580 million years ago and evolved from there. So that most likely explains the how.
We of course don't know the why, maybe we will never know. Maybe there isn't a "why". I agree that it is mindboglingly inexplicable that we are here and sentient right now and somehow emerged from a stark universe of matter and energy but we did. All the ingredients are here and the laws of physics hold true so far. We know chance happens and is a thing. We know infinity is a thing. Those two combined open up the chance for anything but the bottom line is that we just don't know, yet.
Kids, this is why you get your thoughts in order before speaking.
Truth
Isn't it kinda weird to say that the universe isn't conscious when the ingredients of consciousness reside in it. That's like saying my veins don't carry blood because my bone marrow makes it
How could you prove pan-protopsychism since it would involve measuring subjective experiences of subatomic particles.
The idea of 'prototime'; or 'not yet time as we think of it' at the subquantum level, simply kicks the problem down one layer; you then get an infinite regress of proto-proto ... time. I'm not interested in making nice and being 'friendly ' to an essentially incoherent notion - Panpsychism. I used to be attracted to it as a teenager - but that's before I went to physics grad school. There is, as Feynman said, 'Plenty of room at the bottom [known layer of reality]'. But not for panpsychism. Which seems to me an attempt at an end-run round the failure of our wish for 'meaning', to mesh with what physics seems to be saying about the universe. I'll treat panpsychism as simply wrong, absent evidence to the contrary. 'Wishes' are not evidence.
A whole paragraph and you couldn't even tell us why it's wrong
Integrated information theory (IIT) is one of the few attempts to currently try to model consciousness mathematically - and it's eerily similar to panpsychism (C. Koch, Sci. Am. Mind, 2009, 20 (4), 16-19). The thing is, if you subscribe to _any_ version of materialism, you'll have to eventually accept some form or variation of panpsychism; guess Descartes' ghost is not as easy to exorcize as advertised, huh?
@Russell Spears Hmm... not quite. I subscribe to the Jaynesian view that stat mech entropy is just Shannon entropy - so that here the applied concept of "information" is very well-defined, abstract as it is. The big deal that Wheeler made with his 'it from bit', and the noise that Hawking et al. made with the so-called 'black hole information paradox' are really just speculations that oversell the significance of entropy to modern physics.
The problem I have with IIT is that it's just a very crude way to quantify consciousness using some algorithms to compute entropy in a certain way. I don't much mind some spuriousness mentioned by critics that you can use the algorithms to conclude a CD is conscious, but rather that the whole thing is an _ad hoc_ quantification of a thing that you _guess_ is consciousness - so, you can't use it to learn about what it really _is_
@Russell Spears "A symbolic representation that may or may not coincide with our mathematical models" And that is underselling the whole scientific enterprise. Math is but the language of science, which we use to describe simulacra of reality from which we deduce facts and properties of the material world - so saying your simulacrum is wrong is not the same as "math doesn't apply here", or anything like that (though I guess you didn't mean it like that - I just assume someone may read it like that)
"But I'm definitely interested in the embodied ontological status of information" There is none, and that's the point: information is not really the same thing as the on/off or flip-flop switches in your PC, it's a measure of how far from a purely random arrangement those things are at any given moment; matter of fact, this observation is one of the key reasons for me dismissing 'it from bit'
@Russell Spears Wow - thanks for the wall of text; summaries are, indeed, for pussies. Now check out this wall of text:
"Take as an example a light switch and a dimmer switch" So discrete vs. continuous, huh? Nothing really groundbreaking in the transition - cf. part 1 and 2 of Shannon's 1948 paper; see if it introduces as much of a philosophical distinction as you suggest
"the whole idea of "it from bit" is simply making a claim that information is prior to our material reality" Which is, of course, complete horseshit; people that go on to make claims like those really don't understand the core tenets of QM (or at least some of them - which is prolly the case with 'household' names Wheeler, Penrose, Deutsch, among others...)
"these relatively outdated concepts of mass charge spin deals velocity etc.... Even inertia" Yeah, "outdated" - sure 😆 Do yourself a favor, kiddo, and don't pay no nevermind to the ramblings of loopists and stringers till they can actually establish a connection between them and reality
"In fact I don't know of one scientific notion that does not have fundamental issues with it" I agree that the rapid growth of physical knowledge in the last century has prevented a smooth meshing of all the science produced so far - that's why the picture presented by GR, QM and all that seems so paradoxical and 'weird' - and the fringe theorists really haven't been doing much to help clarify things...
"just because we can use mathematics to model the predictability of certain outcomes an experiment doesn't mean that we confuse that model with the actual underlying reality" Which, had you been paying _closer_ attention, is precisely what I did _not_ say: I said math is a language that describes and models _simulacra_ of reality, not reality itself (otherwise you could just program a GTA-like orgy in a PC, hit Enter and have it happen IRL) - other considerations/assumptions must be factored in to translate simulacrum-information into reality-prediction. In the end, though, it comes down to monism vs. dualism: in the case of the former, plus materialism, there's no escape, you can't hide your humanity behind the uncertainty of quanta - in the latter, a material position may not be sustainable, but even there we're not necessarily doomed to lose math because it's a broad language that includes very fundamental ingredients like logic
Reality Check?
*This is like watching an aardvark trying to change a tire...*
I'm pretty sure there isn't a successful theory on Quantum gravity yet, so rejecting panpsychism on the grounds that it doesn't mesh with any of the popular quantum gravity theories, ( or at least which ever one she's promoting), smacks a little too hard of bias imho. Completely unthinkable that whichever quantum theory she's thinking of would be wrong and panpsychism right..right?
Why not just say you have no idea... we dont understand consciousness and trying to figure it out is like being inside of a box and trying to see with your eyes what the outside of the box looks like. Materialism can only take us so far.
This is the most common disconnect in my mind, trying to combine hard math based stuff with fuzzy feelings.
"There is life energy in everything"
"Cool. How many Joules and where does it comes from with abiogenesis?"
"You know... the cosmos,. with quantum spirits or something. Quantum means everything is connected so... telepathy maybe?"
Math? When have you ever seen a 2? Or a 3? Don’t confuse the map for the territory
@@bf3brian, I like the way you make a point! Maths I agree is a map, in that it uses symbols and concepts to represent external realities. However it also reveals such breathtaking beauty and mystery, such as that expressed in Euler's identity. The more it sinks in and is understood, the greater the sense of ethereal and profound wonder.
Potato Man
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I believe the correct term is midiclorians george lucas already solved this one thank Crom for the prequel trilogy!......
1. My opinion based strictly on subjective criteria is that time is not linear. Linear time is a construct, but I don't know if that means that Time doesn't exist. I believe there is room for other concepts.
I love you Big Think, but this one really let me down. It is obvious that this lady doesn’t even know what she talking about- she even states that she doesn’t understand the claims of panpsychism.
Also her demeanor was really off putting throughout this video.
It’s obvious she wants to discredit it, even though there is no current science that has ability to credit or discredit this notion.
And in some deep intuition, we all can feel it’s true potential in reality.
Most people in the world have a sense of God or Spirit- most of us have an inner knowing that consciousness is not confined to complex organisms.
It is fundamental.
At least that’s my take on it.
Modern physics seems to contradict consciousness, not just panpsychism. But we know that consciousness exists.
I think time being emergent doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. But also, I think consciousness can exist non-temporally.
I think you are getting caught up in the weeds. Poetry is better to resolve such a contradiction. The universe itself is alive and every emergence of animate life therein, is an expression of that life, just at a different level of description. Systems theory explains how emergence is part of the fabric of nature.
If time is not fundamental and instead an emergent process.. how would a fundamental particle like a string vibrate?
Surely a vibration is a change in structure over time?
Perhaps the vibration itself is emergent. The string changes from one condition to the next and our inferior temporal minds interpret these sudden and consistent changes as 'vibration?'
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.
You cannot argue elephants in terms of oranges. "Susan, why is panpsychism wrong?" Susan: "The old physics models say so". Sigh....
Let me get this straight, philosophers must modify their musings about consciousness to corroborate the prevailing wisdom of physicists. However, physicists are under no obligation to modify their musings about physics to corroborate the prevailing wisdom of philosophers. Why? Perhaps because empiricism, which was developed by philosophers, is what she prefers. A great deal of objectivity, impartiality, and reasonability here.
The thought process is easier to understand when zooming out. First, however, it's important to point out that sentience may come in many forms, and that time and distance are both relative to our perception of it (which has been and continues to be selected for naturally). Also, keep in mind that nature's selection processes involve selecting for inter-species relationships of all kinds, and those relationships are very intelligently molded to exploit resources efficiently. On a macro level, all the life on a planet is even being "naturally selected" for its ability to survive to some extent once the planet becomes unlivable, and on an even more macro level, all the life within a galaxy/cluster/supercluster is being naturally selected for their ability to unite and direct resources intelligently. That "life" doesn't have to be like us or even what we'd classify as life, as long as it directs resources more intelligently than other groups. Now if we assume that the universe is infinite in time and scale (which is heavily debated but bear with me), we can then assume that this process has been taking place forever and will continue taking place forever. If that's true, eventually all the sentience in a portion of the universe will become so united and skilled at directing information that it experiences something similar to what we experience; if not exactly what we experience. Keep in mind that the individual beings within this system are so united in their objective that they would eventually lack any individual sentience. Similar to the neurons in our minds, these beings' purposes would be singular, but the systems they serve would not be. Similar to how our subconscious minds use experiences and emotions to motivate us to pursue procreation and security, perhaps these systems of systems of individuals would learn to perceive themselves in certain ways that would increase their probabilities of successfully out-competing each other. They'd likely form relationships of all forms; similar to the animals and people we see. Infinitely, this would continue on; individual sentience would be sacrificed for collective unity and that collective unity would eventually create more sentience.
It looks like emerging mind-properties out of emerging mind-properties of populations. From the micro to the macro but probably also from macro to micro as retroactive constrain. Then there is a tension between the one and the multiple. Does the individual really exist? Or it is also a population with an emerging mind-properties? Even our body is a colony of other beings and as "individual" we are part of other populations.
Its an exciting time to be alive where disciplines such as Philosophy and Physics are overlapping once again
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?
Just meditate on a daily basis some months or a couple of years and you may experience consciousness without time.
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 :D
Consciousness doesn't need spacetime and objects to exist. Consciousness is another view of property, and it exists as long as property exists. If properties (characteristics of things) don't exist then nothing exists.
Bad arguments topped by whopping unexplained metaphysical claims.
I hope we can all learn from this: Read books and think for yourself, so you won't look this foolish. As soon as you think you have found some truth, try to see your arguments from the outside. There is always a counterargument that you haven't thought about.
Okay here me out- instead of using words like “consciousness,” “experience,” “feel,” “subjects,” use words like “independence” and “interiority.” It’s not that fundamental particles have an “experience” it’s that even without anyone observing, an electron has its own “in itselfness” independent from everything else in the universe.
i'm almost certainly misunderstanding something (i should/will probably watch this a few more times), but doesn't something like the double-slit experiment give at least the possibility of temporal & non-temporal information and/or experience occurring at fundamental levels of the universe (since it can conform to both rationality alone and then irrationality via an observer)?
...watched a few more times and, ya, i think i'm not really understanding the panpsychists point of view. oh well. still fun to think about.
oh, i did want to add though, i disagree somewhat significantly with certain assumptions the doctor is making about consciousness; in particular, that time is a prerequisite for consciousness. sure, we can only understand ourselves through time (as we have to use our brains to form the necessary ideas and all that jazz); however, as with the double-slit experiment above, observation (and thus consciousness) begins collapsing the wave function immediately (granted, it does takes time for the full collapse to happen, but once the effect is underway it cannot be undone -- as far as i can tell with a bit of research). the amount of time it takes to collapse the function is effectively inconsequential for our purposes -- it's the fact that it collapses and WILL collapse that is important. again, i'm most certainly out of my depth, but fun fun
You are basing your conclusions on beliefs
How?
Flashback: Ouch!
I should never have signed up for that sophomore level class
without taking the prerequisite.
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But I was entertained while I doodled.
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When have you ever empirically experienced a brain? 😂😂✌️
Finally a scientiest who actually understands philosophy. Still, I don't agree with her position but it at least engages the actual topic.
That was super interesting. I'll check out whether she or someone else has written anything more about the relationship of panpsychism and modern physics.
Consciousness and time are the most puzzling aspects of our world.
It seemed like a very surface-level analysis, using vague language which does not really help, There is lack of paperwork on her part too.
We did not even give a definition to what is considered consciousness for the concept to not "match with physics", physics in the end ought to match with the logical patterns of reality and even be harmonious to the subjective patterns of experience. There is a logic behind everything as well as an unbounded nature of freedom. Bothways can work if we figure out how and there is the truth.
Weird, chalmers for example claims that consciousness may be fundamental LIKE how space and time are fundamental. People don't disagree with the fundamentality of space and time.
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.
“We exist in time”
“If...it doesn’t mesh with physics, we have a problem”
"proto-space/time" is called eternity. idealism/platonism and panpsychism are very compatible.
Atoms are tools that molecules use to effect their intentions. Things can happen randomly, but to happen in one direction, molecules need to know what they want.
I think this is only a problem if you are defining consciousness as the separate self. The sense of being a subject separate from the object. It is possible to experience states of experience through meditation and yogic practices that removes the sense of "I" and shows you that the true nature of your subjective experience is a state of emptiness in which phenomena arise. The sense of being an "I" is just one of those many phenomena being experienced within that emptiness. I don't believe that consciousness is fundamental but I think it emerges from a more fundamental state that is also intangible but has no qualities. There is no mind, no self, darkness, silence, no sense of time or space. Basically you can imagine reality as being in a state of deep sleep or having an experience of nonexistence. The fact that we can sit here and know what is like to exist implies there is something that it is like to not exist. Just like how light implies darkness. And within this state of emptiness different types of phenomenon including the illusion of consciousness have the potential to manifest.
2:34 she argues that consciousness is tied to temporal phenomena and then says "it [consciousness] causes events in the mind" really messes up her position. Otherwise, reasonable position overall.
How is existence possible? It is not. -We are existing, in a dynamic format. -Humano Racional.
"If what they're claiming doesn't mesh with physics, that's a problem." Last sentence. Seems clear enough to me
I don't get it. We know our consciousness is a function of our brains. When the brain stops functioning, consciousness stops. Is it really so complicated?
Actually, that is incorrect. The 'mind' is a function of our brain, not consciousness - and we know that consciousness does continue after our body and our brain stops.
Well, yes. Because we don't know WHY consciousness is a function of our brains. Especially since they're made of the same stuff as everything else. We can understand how complex chemical interactions can result in systems that exhibit lifelike behavior, yes, but what specifically gives rise to our actual inner awareness is the mystery.
Given that she hasn't even defined consciousness, I struggled with her whole argument. I was also shocked by her very judgemental approach. So much for science...
How can you provide a reality check when you don't understand the theory you're attempting to debunk?
Because spatial and temporal can be relationally measured through correlation, anything in scientific research is correlation/relational based rather than intrinsically based. Panpsychism can't be observed/measured in that same way. They don't conflict with quantum theory.
I'm glad I'm not the only one that feels like she's a bit behind.
That's funny, because what she says shows she didn't get the point, and probably never would unless by having a direct experience. Taking the example of Buddhism, or non duality, the claim is that consciousness comes first, without objective qualities. Objects come by "separating" this consciousness, every object only existing relative to an other one. Physics itself being an object in consciousness, existing only relatively to an other object (people's minds), there's no way to suppress all emergent phenomenon from it by analyzing it from inside the system, relatively to an other part of the system.
So yeah, the claim is actually unprovable, by definition making it non scientific.
By the way, all science and physics rely on the premise that the physical world exists outside consciousness, which is itself an unprovable axiom.
There's too much scientists (and people at large) viewing science as a way to prove absolute truth, making it an implicit religion while it should be seen as what it is, a great social construct and a tool to enhance the world.
Recognizing this is life changing when you've been oblivious to it your whole life.
Get Donald Hoffman on the show. He is not a panpsychism proponent, but his theory of concsciouss agents is fascinating. He ahs a TED talk about it, check it out.
He doesn't have a theory of how consciousness works, he has a theory of the contents of consciousness
The things this doctor says about time are dubious because it's quite clear that consciousness perceives time in different ways, so there isn't just one objective version of time that we can all agree upon. If you meditate correctly, consciousness simply stands alone, and it's not formulating any notions about time. When you put your hand on a hot stove for 15 seconds, the time is going to seem a lot longer than the time you spend petting your cat for 15 seconds. If you could reach the speed of light, time wouldn't exist at all, because that's the limit of speed in the universe and time revolves around it, not vice versa. So, with time being such a flexible concept, I don't see how it isn't a construction contingent on how we perceive it.
"Mesh with physics" is your angle? What if the current definition of your "physics" is wrong or misguided? What, then, are you meshing with?
Quantum Gravity is replete with competing theories. It’s one of the true frontiers of science.
I think she misunderstands panpsychism. The basic idea of panpsychism is that the elements of consciousness or mind is a part of the fundamental structure of reality. Contra her assertion, I do not believe that, as a panpsychist, one must posit fundamental conscious SUBJECTS of experience. I think that the protopanpsychism she posits is compatible with panpsychism.