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What is this? The 17th century? Descartes’ machine view of everything nonhuman?
It’s also worth noting that science can’t prove humans are conscious.
There’s a reason it’s called “the hard problem.”
It’s all a figment of my imagination after all
I will admit I get enjoyment from guiding pseudo intelligent down the path of discovering that absolutely nothing is real and for as far as we are able to detect everything may as well be the fever dream of a turtle.
What does old stumps mean?
It all depends on what you mean by “conscious”, which IMO doesn’t fall under “Maybe everything is conscious” because that’s wrongly assuming that “conscious” is a binary property instead of a spectrum that humans and plants are both on while clearly being at vastly different levels. Maybe I just have a much looser definition of “conscious” than most people, but why don’t tropisms count as a very primitive form of consciousness?
Not sure if you know that what you’re describing has a name it’s called Panpsychism and it is gaining some popularity but that’s not because there’s any reason to believe in it or any evidence, it’s a fanciful idea about the universe that doesn’t really help or connect anything. IE: panpsychism doesn’t make for a better explanation for anything than the idea that you are just a singular consciousness living in it’s most probable state to be able to observe or experience anything.
I’m not shooting it down, it’s one of those things we just will never know, but that’s a pretty huge list of things and possibilities so I just don’t know if it’s more or less useful than any other philosophical view.
I don’t think I’m talking about panpsychism. To me, that’s just giving up and hand wavey. I’m much more interested in trying to come up with a more concrete, empirical definition. I think questions like “Well, why aren’t plants conscious” or “Why isn’t an LLM conscious” are good ways to explore the limits of any particular definition and find things it fails to explain properly.
I don’t think a rock or electron could be considered conscious, for example. Neither has an internal model of the world in any way.
Since you so clearly elucidated it, you may know this is actually a thing called panprotopsychism. I’m fully on board with it but of course, the Internet knows with absolute certainty it’s complete and utter bullshit, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Edit: apparently so does at least one downvoter.
Straw man gish gallop
