[ExI] Personal conclusions

Spencer Campbell lacertilian at gmail.com
Sun Feb 7 00:34:53 UTC 2010


Aware <aware at awareresearch.com>:
> And despite accumulating evidence of the incoherence of consciousness,
> with all its gaps, distortions, fabrication and confabulation, we hang
> on to it, and decide it must be a very Hard Problem.  Thus inoculated,
> and fortified by the biases built in to our language and culture, we
> know that when someone comes along and says that it's actually very
> simple, cf. Dennett, Metzinger, Pollack, Buddha..., we can be sure,
> even though we can't make sense of what they're saying, that they must
> be wrong.
>
> A few deeper thinkers, aiming for greater coherence over greater
> context, have suggested that either all entities "have consciousness"
> or none do.  This is a step in the right direction.  Then the
> question, clarified, might be decided in simply information-theoretic
> terms.  But even then, more often they will side with Panpsychism
> (even a rock has consciousness, but only a little) than to face the
> possibility of non-existence of an essential experiencer.

Considering the thread's subject, it seems safe to burn some bytes on
personal information. So: I subscribe to panexperientialism myself.
Either everything has subjective experience, or nothing does.

Unfortunately this doesn't help me at all when faced with a question
like, "is a human more conscious than a pig more conscious than a fly
more conscious than a rock?". I want to say yes, really I do, but at
the moment I just can't! I see no reason whatsoever why certain
amounts or types of information processing should "attract" excess
consciousness, if, like me, you want to treat it as a fundamental
property of matter.

So, my contributions to the discussion are probably incremental at
best. I have stepped far enough back to understand that I understand
nothing, and just barely further.

Dennett, Metzinger, Pollack, Buddha (Gautama?). I have some books to
put on my reading list.



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