I’m pretty sure that rocks are not conscious. It’s just that the best way I’m able to express what I mean by “consciousness” may end up apparently including rocks, without me really claiming that rocks are conscious like humans are—in the same way that your definition of computation literally includes air, but you’re not really talking about air.
This still doesn’t really specify what your view is. Your view may be that strictly speaking nothing is conscious, but in the looser sense in which we are conscious, anything could be modeled as conscious with equal warrant. This view is a polite version of eliminativism.
Or your view may be that strictly speaking everything is conscious, but in the looser sense in which we prefer to single out human-style consciousness, we can bracket the consciousness of rocks. In that case, I’d want to hear about just what kind of consciousness rocks have. If dust specks are themselves moral patients, this could throw an interesting wrench into the ‘dust specks vs. torture’ debate. This is panpsychism.
Or maybe your view is that rocks are almost conscious, that there’s some sort of Consciousness Gap that the world crosses, Leibniz-style. In that case, I’d want an explanation of what it means for something to almost be conscious, and how you could incrementally build up to Consciousness Proper.
I don’t understand this. How would saying “all is Mind” explain why qualia feel the way they do?
The Hard Problem is not “Give a reductive account of Mind!” It’s “Explain how Mind could arise from a purely non-mental foundation!” Idealism and panpsychism dissolve the problem by denying that the foundation is non-mental; and eliminativism dissolves the problem by denying that there’s such a thing as “Mind” in the first place.
This still doesn’t really specify what your view is. Your view may be that strictly speaking nothing is conscious, but in the looser sense in which we are conscious, anything could be modeled as conscious with equal warrant. This view is a polite version of eliminativism.
Or your view may be that strictly speaking everything is conscious, but in the looser sense in which we prefer to single out human-style consciousness, we can bracket the consciousness of rocks. In that case, I’d want to hear about just what kind of consciousness rocks have. If dust specks are themselves moral patients, this could throw an interesting wrench into the ‘dust specks vs. torture’ debate. This is panpsychism.
Or maybe your view is that rocks are almost conscious, that there’s some sort of Consciousness Gap that the world crosses, Leibniz-style. In that case, I’d want an explanation of what it means for something to almost be conscious, and how you could incrementally build up to Consciousness Proper.
The Hard Problem is not “Give a reductive account of Mind!” It’s “Explain how Mind could arise from a purely non-mental foundation!” Idealism and panpsychism dissolve the problem by denying that the foundation is non-mental; and eliminativism dissolves the problem by denying that there’s such a thing as “Mind” in the first place.