I haven’t read Brian Tomasik’s thoughts on this, so let me know if you think I’m misunderstanding him / should read more.
The hard problem of consciousness at least gives us a prima facie reason to consider panpsychism. (Though I think this ultimately falls apart when we consider ‘we couldn’t know about the hard problem of consciousness if non-interactionist panpsychism were true; and interactionist panpsychism would mean new, detectable physics’.)
If we deny the hard problem, then I don’t see any reason to give panpsychism any consideration in the first place. We could distinguish two panpsychist views here: ‘trivial’ (doesn’t have any practical implications, just amounts to defining ‘consciousness’ so broadly as to include anything and everything); and ‘nontrivial’ (has practical implications, or at least the potential for such; e.g., perhaps the revelation that panpsychism is true should cause us to treat electrons as moral patients, with their own rights and/or their own welfare).
But I see no reason whatsoever to think that electrons are moral patients, or that electrons have any other nontrivial mental property. The mere fact that we don’t fully understand how human brains work is not a reason to ask whether there’s some new undiscovered feature of particles ∼1031 times smaller than a human brain that explains the comically larger macro-process—any more than limitations in our understanding of stomachs would be a reason to ask whether individual electrons have some hidden digestive properties.
I haven’t read Brian Tomasik’s thoughts on this, so let me know if you think I’m misunderstanding him / should read more.
The hard problem of consciousness at least gives us a prima facie reason to consider panpsychism. (Though I think this ultimately falls apart when we consider ‘we couldn’t know about the hard problem of consciousness if non-interactionist panpsychism were true; and interactionist panpsychism would mean new, detectable physics’.)
If we deny the hard problem, then I don’t see any reason to give panpsychism any consideration in the first place. We could distinguish two panpsychist views here: ‘trivial’ (doesn’t have any practical implications, just amounts to defining ‘consciousness’ so broadly as to include anything and everything); and ‘nontrivial’ (has practical implications, or at least the potential for such; e.g., perhaps the revelation that panpsychism is true should cause us to treat electrons as moral patients, with their own rights and/or their own welfare).
But I see no reason whatsoever to think that electrons are moral patients, or that electrons have any other nontrivial mental property. The mere fact that we don’t fully understand how human brains work is not a reason to ask whether there’s some new undiscovered feature of particles ∼1031 times smaller than a human brain that explains the comically larger macro-process—any more than limitations in our understanding of stomachs would be a reason to ask whether individual electrons have some hidden digestive properties.