this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2024
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Think clockwork. We used to believe that animals couldn't feel pain. They weren't complex subjects situated in a complex environment, but simple biological machines that would yelp in response to a stimuli. It was reductive and lost sight of the bigger picture. Animal cognition is the actual materialist understanding which then unlocks all of the other interdisciplinary scientific observations, its materialistic truth confirmed through those. We do vulgar materialism when we do something like MAGA Communism's class reductionism. Throw out all of the superstructural issues that people experience the economy through in favour of a purely economic critique that abstracts them into one generic class. Sure you're left with an observable number and you've stripped away everything that isn't quantifiable, but your materialist critique is limited and acting on it would lead to something like the chauvinism that limited American communists in the 1930s.
Me launching in to a diatribe about how trees are sentient but their sentience is so radically alien to ours, and happens on such a slow time scale, that we are unable to recognize it and unwilling to entertain the idea that radically alien intelligence exists all arounf us.
Are you an actual pan psychic in the wild? I've always wanted to talk to someone who holds that view.
What? No. Plants show problem solving ability and awareness of their surroundings in ways that go far beyond their traditional conception of being inert and and unaware of their environment. Panpsychism is woo woo nonsense. I'm talking about observable light, water, and nutrient seeking behaviors, apparently altruistic chemical signalling of danger, protection of offspring, some kind of communication with neighbors to mediate conflict over resources. You have to zoom way, way out to make it look anything like animal communication but these creatures are aware of their environment and interacting with organisms around them.
Sure those behaviours are observed. But what specifically makes you think consciousness is likely? Obviously we can't measure consciousness at this point, (or perhaps ever it's quite unclear) but most people fall somewhere between "brains do it" and the more chauvinistic "human brains do it".
This isn't really something you can talk about particularly scientifically, the closest to that is basically that we observe that in humans people report modifications to consciousness if you dick with their brains and we tend to avoid wanting to overcomplicate hypotheses with second order things until necessary. We can then try making comparisons between human brains and non human brains but it's all very speculative.
You can assume behavioural complexity requires consciousness but it's pretty vibes based and drawing lines is hard. Most people also seem to not ascribe say complex algorithms, bacterial colonies, or water cycles or whatever consciousness though.
So I'm curious where you fall. Personally I don't think pan psychism is woo but I don't subscribe. Stuff just is conscious doesn't seem any more or less reasonable to me than a lot of other "stuff in this particular arrangement just is conscious" type hypotheses, especially when humans can have all sorts of modifications to their brains and continue to describe being conscious (p zombies???).
I don't want to bait, I'm genuinely interested although personally consider myself more of a fence sitter on non animal sentience. Suspecting it's less likely but of course unprovable one way or the other atm.
I didn't say consciousness, I said sentient. They're distinct concepts. I don't find consciousness to be an interesting or useful concept.
Everyone seems to use the words differently but in general sentience is accepted as the ability to feel and respond to one's environment. That implies a thing which is able to feel/be aware often synonymous with consciousness although some people say consciousness is sentience + imagination etc.
I mean it as there being a thing which feels like something to be.
If you mean it otherwise could you please define it? Or if you're happy to proceed with that definition of consciousness and sentience (which requires consciousness as defined) could you proceed with answering my questions?
You don't need pan-psychism to recognize plants are living organisms. Like, you can anesthetize a tree. In fact, anesthetics work on... pretty much every living organism? I'm not aware of any exceptions.
Plants are living yes, and hormone signals etc happen in them sure. It's not known what causes consciousness though, hell we don't even know why general anesthetics work in humans and we generally only believe them to disrupt consciousness because you ask people about it later and they say they have no recollection, except sometimes when they do so amnesics are often administered as a failsafe.
What do you mean when you say anesthetise a tree? And why is that evidence of sentience? Like lignocaine will work on the nerves in my arm. You could keep my arm alive after removing it from me (at least for a while) and inject lignocaine and observe interrupted nerve signals. Most people don't believe amputated arms to be sentient though.
Oh, they found out what anesthetics does. It stops the formation of microtubuals within cells. So, pretty much anything can be anesthetized. And it suggest microtubuals might play a role in cognition.
I don't really see why plants wouldn't have some rudimentary sense of themselves? I mean, it wouldn't be as detailed as what animals experience, but they're alive, so why not? Maybe that's a leap. But, so is assuming the inverse. Arguably, that's a bigger assumption; why one kingdom of life and not the other?
This sounds like Penrose's stuff which is umm not widely accepted.
Being alive is not a clearly defined state, it's a classification we impose on the world. Assuming life is conscious is pretty close to panpsychism, especially when we get to organisms like fungi or plants without centralised structures. That's not saying it's wrong, as you say we can't exactly go and measure it. At this stage it is not an empirical question.
But uncertainty doesn't mean anything is equally likely. toy example: radioactive decay timing probabilities.
Most people tend to come down on assuming brains have something to do with consciousness because humans describe consciousness being modified by stuff happening to their brains and not the rest of them. If you come down on all life being conscious to some degree or another why? and where do you differ from the pan psychics who say all stuff is conscious to some degree or another?
Yeah, I pick up a lot of this reading and listening to Penrose.
I kinda think about it like the evolution of eyes. So, for a while creationists liked to point to eyes and say, "how could such a structure slowly evolve, what good is half an eye?" and of course the answer is, "far preferable to no eye whatsoever." And there's evidence of development from rudimentary sensitivity to electromagnetism, gradually improving with lenses and pin-hole apertures and colour specific structures.
So... I think about sentience in that same means of gradually increasing complexity. Cus like you can say a brain is integral, but how does it start? Where doe the phenomenon actually begin? I think it makes sense to suppose some equivalent to that patch of photo-sensitivity that eventually becomes an eye. Microtubuals pose the most likely candidate for that role, though yeah it's still tentative. And... if we're gonna assume some minimal level of awareness, I don't think it's that big of a stretch to suppose it exists in things that react to their environment.
And that's where the similarity to pan-psychism ends. Why should I make that assumption for a virus or a rock or a hydrogen atom? Those aren't cells. They don't react to their environment or reproduce on their own. A universe where those things are conscious would be functionally identical to one where they aren't.