This question is not very well-posed, but I’ve done my best to make it as well-posed as I can.
Suppose that humans with sufficiently functional brains are able have subjective experiences that transcend the “easy problems of consciousness”.
I’m interested in understanding if this can be reasonably accepted without also concluding a theory of some sort of “panpsychism”. For instance, taking a single conscious human and working backwards in time to conception: is it natural to believe a non-zero level of consciousness or subjective experience emerges at some time in this process, or is it more natural to believe the zygote has a level of consciousness?
From another perspective, start with the same human, and keep going up the ancestral tree (applying some system to pick a parent when there are multiple). If consciousness isn’t quantized and keeps decreasing as we go back, and we further assume life emerged from inorganic processes, do we eventually arrive at some theory of panpsychism?
My intuition is that panpsychism seems false and I have genuine subjective experiences. To reconcile this, I think I would need consciousness to be quantized in some way. Is there a natural reason to believe consciousness is quantized? Is there any recommended reading on this?
[Question] Quantized vs. continuous nature of qualia
This question is not very well-posed, but I’ve done my best to make it as well-posed as I can.
Suppose that humans with sufficiently functional brains are able have subjective experiences that transcend the “easy problems of consciousness”.
I’m interested in understanding if this can be reasonably accepted without also concluding a theory of some sort of “panpsychism”. For instance, taking a single conscious human and working backwards in time to conception: is it natural to believe a non-zero level of consciousness or subjective experience emerges at some time in this process, or is it more natural to believe the zygote has a level of consciousness?
From another perspective, start with the same human, and keep going up the ancestral tree (applying some system to pick a parent when there are multiple). If consciousness isn’t quantized and keeps decreasing as we go back, and we further assume life emerged from inorganic processes, do we eventually arrive at some theory of panpsychism?
My intuition is that panpsychism seems false and I have genuine subjective experiences. To reconcile this, I think I would need consciousness to be quantized in some way. Is there a natural reason to believe consciousness is quantized? Is there any recommended reading on this?