Ask Lemmy

Well this is a shame as we seemed to be in agreement on the comment thread above.

Hey I'm still all for the good vibes here. We're still on the same page, I shouldn't have phrased it like that. I'm just saying that our understanding of what Bsit was saying differs. I would also like to add, for the sake of goodwill, that I've really enjoyed chatting with you here.

I didn’t even pick you up of the fact that none of the papers you linked were evidence for panpsychism, just exploring where consciousness is located in the brain and potential mathematical frameworks for it.

I know, I wasn't trying to provide evidence for panpsychism, I was just trying to show that IIT makes predictions (something that the guy I was talking to was denying).

I see no paths to evidence for idealism myself and asked for some but received none. So yes, I’m afraid I will dismiss a theory which doesn’t make any predictions and can’t be proved/disproved.

This is I think where the fundamental disagreement lies. Bsit was making a philosophical claim, so the apparatus of science doesn't really work here. We can't really prove or disprove the idea using experiments, we can only discuss how coherent the idea is. In this sense philosophy is more like math than science.

To address your extremely charitable interpretation… What does matter being an interpretation of consciousness even mean to you? To me it would mean that we are some kind of Boltzmann brain imagining the universe into existence.

I think this is the fundamental issue. It's easy to miss, but you're framing of it is still implicitly putting matter first by assuming that, in order for there to be experience, there would need to be Boltzmann brains. But in idealism, everything, even Boltzmann brains, would be happening within consciousness. Consciousness comes first, brains come second (the two happen to be coupled, but even this experience of them being coupled is happening within consciousness). Consciousness is like a giant container that contains everything else within it. Consciousness is like a canvas, and the material world is like the paint on that canvas. We construct stories about how the changes in the brain cause changes in consciousness, and those stories are true (there are clear correlations here), but they themselves are happening on the canvas.

A good way to think of this is like 3D space, or extension. Except for a point, every shape is within space (ie it has length, width, height) and is within space. It doesn't make sense to ask which of the shapes cause space (is it the spheres? the trapezoids?), or which shapes come before space (maybe its the cubes), because shapes by necessity cannot exist unless they are immersed in space. In the same way, under idealism it wouldn't make sense to think about Boltzmann brains (or any kind of brains) causing experience; that would be like asking which shapes cause space. Instead, consciousness is just the dimension brains and all other physical objects exist within. They cannot exist without consciousness in the same way that shapes cannot exist without three-dimensional space.