I suspect panpsychism is in this boat. We have lots of philosophical reasons to think it makes sense, but making it the consensus requires overcoming two related difficulties:
convincing ourselves that “consciousness” is less special and magical than we currently think it is
reducing consciousness to something easily observable
Part of the problem seems to be we don’t have the ability to adequately inspect the most complex conscious systems, and until we do it will remain possible to keep claiming “yeah, but real consciousness is special and not everything has it” because we imagine the simple pattern that strong theories of panpsychism propose explains consciousness is insufficient to explain the specialness of humans, animals, etc.
(This is not to be confused with weak theories of panpsychism, which are woo and reasonably dismissed (based on current evidence) because they propose the existence of phenomena we have not observed, like plants, rocks, and systems being as agentic as animals, but you know, in secret, or only on another plane of existence.)
That’s an interesting point of view. It makes me wonder if there’s a useful definition of consciousness along the same vein as the “negative entropy” definition of life (meaning something is alive if it reverses entropy in its local environment).
There’s a theory called IIT which Scott Aaronson rejected because he didn’t think “every time you start up your DVD player you’re lighting the fire of consciousness.”
I suspect panpsychism is in this boat. We have lots of philosophical reasons to think it makes sense, but making it the consensus requires overcoming two related difficulties:
convincing ourselves that “consciousness” is less special and magical than we currently think it is
reducing consciousness to something easily observable
Part of the problem seems to be we don’t have the ability to adequately inspect the most complex conscious systems, and until we do it will remain possible to keep claiming “yeah, but real consciousness is special and not everything has it” because we imagine the simple pattern that strong theories of panpsychism propose explains consciousness is insufficient to explain the specialness of humans, animals, etc.
(This is not to be confused with weak theories of panpsychism, which are woo and reasonably dismissed (based on current evidence) because they propose the existence of phenomena we have not observed, like plants, rocks, and systems being as agentic as animals, but you know, in secret, or only on another plane of existence.)
That’s an interesting point of view. It makes me wonder if there’s a useful definition of consciousness along the same vein as the “negative entropy” definition of life (meaning something is alive if it reverses entropy in its local environment).
There’s a theory called IIT which Scott Aaronson rejected because he didn’t think “every time you start up your DVD player you’re lighting the fire of consciousness.”