Not surprisingly, I have a few issues with your chain of reasoning.
1. I exist. (Cogito, ergo sum). I’m a thinking, conscious entity that experiences existence at this specific point in time in the multiverse.
Cogito is an observation. I am not arguing with that one. Ergo sum is an assumption, a model. The “multiverse” thing is a speculation.
Our understanding of physics is that there is no fundamental thing that we can reduce conscious experience down to. We’re all just quarks and leptons interacting.
This is very much simplified. Sure, we can do reduction, but that doesn’t mean we can do synthesis. There is no guarantee that it is even possible to do synthesis. In fact, there are mathematical examples where synthesis might not be possible, simply because the relevant equations cannot be solved uniquely. I made a related point here. Here is an example. Consciousness can potentially be reduced to atoms, but it may also be reduced to bits, a rather different substrate. Maybe there are other reductions possible.
And it is also possible that constructing consciousness out of quarks and leptons is impossible because of “hard emergence”. Of the sorites kind. There is no atom of water. A handful of H2O molecules cannot be described as a solid, liquid or gas. A snowflake requires trillions of trillions of H2O molecules together. There is no “snowflakiness” in a single molecule. Just like there is no consciousness in an elementary particle. There is no evidence for panpsychism, and plenty against it.
Postulating hard emergence requires a non-local postulate. I’m not willing to accept that without testable predictions.
I don’t really see how “ergo sum” is an assumption. If any thing it is a direct inference, but not an assumption. Something exists that is perceiving. Any theory that says otherwise must be incorrect.
If consciousness only “emerges” when an information processing system is constructed at a higher level, then that implies that the whole is something different than the aggregate of its many individual interactions. This is unlike shminux’s description liquid water emerging from H2O interactions, which is confusing of map and territory. If a physical description stated that an interaction is conscious if and only if it is part of an information processing system, that is something that cannot be determined with local information at the exact time and place of the individual interactions.
I’m biting the bullet of QM (the standard model, or whatever quantum gravity formulation wins out) being all there is. If that is true, then explaining subjective experience requires a local postulate not an added rule, which results in panpsychism.
Not surprisingly, I have a few issues with your chain of reasoning.
Cogito is an observation. I am not arguing with that one. Ergo sum is an assumption, a model. The “multiverse” thing is a speculation.
This is very much simplified. Sure, we can do reduction, but that doesn’t mean we can do synthesis. There is no guarantee that it is even possible to do synthesis. In fact, there are mathematical examples where synthesis might not be possible, simply because the relevant equations cannot be solved uniquely. I made a related point here. Here is an example. Consciousness can potentially be reduced to atoms, but it may also be reduced to bits, a rather different substrate. Maybe there are other reductions possible.
And it is also possible that constructing consciousness out of quarks and leptons is impossible because of “hard emergence”. Of the sorites kind. There is no atom of water. A handful of H2O molecules cannot be described as a solid, liquid or gas. A snowflake requires trillions of trillions of H2O molecules together. There is no “snowflakiness” in a single molecule. Just like there is no consciousness in an elementary particle. There is no evidence for panpsychism, and plenty against it.
Postulating hard emergence requires a non-local postulate. I’m not willing to accept that without testable predictions.
I don’t really see how “ergo sum” is an assumption. If any thing it is a direct inference, but not an assumption. Something exists that is perceiving. Any theory that says otherwise must be incorrect.
That is not obvious.
If consciousness only “emerges” when an information processing system is constructed at a higher level, then that implies that the whole is something different than the aggregate of its many individual interactions. This is unlike shminux’s description liquid water emerging from H2O interactions, which is confusing of map and territory. If a physical description stated that an interaction is conscious if and only if it is part of an information processing system, that is something that cannot be determined with local information at the exact time and place of the individual interactions.
I’m biting the bullet of QM (the standard model, or whatever quantum gravity formulation wins out) being all there is. If that is true, then explaining subjective experience requires a local postulate not an added rule, which results in panpsychism.