philosophy

Qualia are what you perceive as a subjective experience, and you are able to relate that experience to other people because of human/animal input/output organs. We can measure brain activity associated with certain stimuli. But we don't know how these things are related, and we don't know what the requirements are for thoughts and experiences. Things without the ability to communicate may have thoughts that they can't tell us about or that we can't measure -- how are we actually supposed to know?

In terms of experiences like ours, brains seem necessary, but what about the universe tells you we know about other toes of structures?

For example, we don't even know the "minimum" number of brain cells to make a thought. 10? 100? 100,000? 10M? Is there a minimum? Do other organs produce thoughts as well but just can't tell us?

Heck, people have hooked up robot arms to mycelium and it moves it around based on stimuli -- what does the mycelium perceive when that happens? If someone hooked up a new input or output organ to you, would you start perceiving it internally as qualia, or would it always seem external?

Consciousness IMO isn't a field of study for science. Science is based on the measurement of observable phenomena, and consciousness is the subjective experience. We can't observe it in others, so how could we hope to form a testable theory? Utterly absurd.

Tangentially related, Anton just dropped this fascinating vid: Why Did Consciousness Evolve? Exciting Research on Bird Brains. TL;DW: Bird brains evolved with completely different brain structures than mammals. And not only do they display signs of consciousness (the example used is pointing a laser on the animal and seeing if they recognize that the dot is on them while looking at themselves in a mirror), but apparently they're more efficient, being more capable than mammal brains for their size.

i think it's unfair to write off metaphysical idealism (which iirc panpsychism is under the umbrella of) as mysticism, it's a philosophical position with various arguments for and against it, one you disagree with (which is fine) but simply asserting something seems like it's obviously a byproduct of matter isn't compelling. it strikes me as working backwards out of a faith-based desire to have physicalism as an unquestioned first principle. 

fwiw, after a philosophy dual major in undergrad many moons ago, i basically emerged a soft skeptic about philosophical knowledge (with one or two basic, undoubtable positions) which is part of why i didn't pursue it further (outside idly pondering those big universal questions for fun/to deepen my experience of the world from the comfort of my armchair). i also acknowledge i don't live as a skeptic - it seems impossible to do so and to function - so like everyone i take various (at times contradictory) leaps of faith about the nature of reality.

It's chemical soup animated by electricity. Everything our bodies do is in response to some preceding event. You're alive because of an unbroken chain of life stretching back to the simplest natural chemical reactions. It's been a nonstop craving for energy and resources ever since then.

Humans give themselves far too much credit. Everything living on the planet is equally just as alive as any of us. We share a massive amount of genetic similarities to not just animals, but also plants and fungi. I'm not saying we should sacrifice a human life for that of a fly, but rather that, to the fly, it's life is just as meaningful and important as ours. Our existence is barely a blip in the planets history.

The dinosaurs spent millions of years dominating the Earth. How can we say, in our measly 200,000, that we are Gods favorite and uniquely bestowed a soul? What right have we to claim to be so elevated above all other life on Earth? We eat, breathe, die, the same as everything else in this world. The passage of time is unavoidable. "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings..."

Not sure qualia is real or tangible thing

Qualia is obviously a biological component of experience

Not very Leninist!!! The brain, per se, does not think. Trying to approach the subject from that purely biological perspective is doomed to failure. Human cognition is nothing without social labor.

All this talk of neurons.

As an idiot, I still think cytoskeletons within cells are the most interesting avenue of research. Microtubules are responsible for an awful lot of things that happen within cells, from movement to pulling chromosome copies apart in division. There's some buzz that their structure gives may might maybe give them "quantum computational properties" and they appear to be what anesthetics affect. Although its all still early research and there's a lot of "could"s "possibly"s and "maybe"s.

I also don't agree with most stuff I hear about qualia, but I don't think refuting them is easy, because you need an alternative concept for what we seem to feel and experience subjectively. People who write and edit articles like this one aren't dumb and have probably already anticipated every argument we could make against qualia.

Also, empirical science can only answer a limited set of questions. Many legitimate philosophical questions are meta-physical. For example the questions what distinguishes science from pseudo-science, what knowledge is, what is possible for us to know and what the scientific method should be. There is currently no consensus on any of these among philosophers/scientists. It might even be logically impossible to prove an answer to any of them.

Personally, I tend to agree with you. Or at least, I tend towards the view, that empirical science should in principle be able to one day lend strong support to a metaphysical explanation of qualia as emergent, that only invokes a minimum of new assumptions. I just don't think it'll be that easy.

If all the cells in my body can create consciousness that I am experiencing then why couldn't all the bodies on Earth create a consciousness that the planet would experience?

I think of it as consciousness modeling the internal/external states of being. Qualia might be a black box, but it has interfaces. I think sensory deprivation hallucination provides some backing to this interpretation. Without the sense data reaching the interfaces, the internal states and external states diverge in unpredictable ways because the consciousness has no way to continuously relate them over time. I'm probably leaning on the computer metaphor a bit much here, but it's the best reference frame I could think of right now.

To provide some info to those unaware:

Pansychism is the philosophy that consciousness is at the root of the universe in the same way matter is. Everything has consciousness innately built into it, our brains just have the capabilities of harnessing that consciousness in particular ways.

This philosophy is popular because it helps address "the hard problem of consciousness" which is basically the question of why do we have subjective experience at all? If we are simply biological machines bumping against our environment why do we have subjective experience and why is that subjective experience so... Subjective?

Biology seems to explain this pretty simply: consciousness is the systems ability to take external and internal diagnostics and use it to make decisions that will help achieve homeostasis within the system, assuring system stability, improving evolutionary success...

To me, that explanation seems to cover all the bases. Why is my red different than yours? Because we are different physical constructs in different places in spacetime. We are different variables in the equation, we will have different outputs.

Why can't we locate that red in the brain? Because red isn't real, it's your experience piecing together a whole heap of sensory data and presenting it in an identifiable way, because being able to distingiush different wave lengths gives you an evolutionary advantage.

When i was studying philosophy, panpsychism was treated a bit like skepticism in general. Fascinating and compelling arguments, but not practicable. It is true that logic is a closed system, so you can’t really determine a priori that the sun will rise tomorrow. No one actually lives like the sun isn’t showing up. We have no idea what the cause or mechanism of consciousness is, and as such there is no reason to assume that certain types of cell or an arrangement of them are related to it.

In the literature, the idea that the exact specific cells of your body make up your consciousness or that there’s a specific pattern of cells that make it up are variants of hard materialism, with respect to consciousness. They are also wrong (One’s cells replace themselves, so if consciousness was in the specific cells you’d get ship of theseus’ed. We also don’t act like many brain injuries change a person.)

With all that above in mind, the argument that there’s no inherent reason to treat of pile of wires as different from a pile of ganglia or neurons was one of those arguments that someone came up with as a counterpoint more than a real point. The only ‘professional’ philosopher that adheres to panpsychism is David Chalmers, and some people in the field think he’s doing a long running bit.

my personal view is that panpsychism claims that elementary particles (either the normal ones we know or some new ones) have a mental or proto-mental character. This is to stay that a bunch of particles together give rise to complex forms. This is another way of taking materialism (in philosophy of consciousness, zero relation to political theory) at its word and treating consciousness as something that developed from lava-cooked, meteorite-seeded primordial soup. We already think proteins and organelles and organisms are increasingly complex combinations of these particles, so if consciousness is an organic phenomenon, why wouldn’t it follow a similar path?

i think the point of this is to demonstrate that materialism (brain is conscious experience and changing one will definitionally change the other) is at least an incomplete picture. i definitely don’t agree with it personally, but i do think it’s an interesting idea in the contemporary philosophical conversation about the mind.