this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2024
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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.