Philosophical musings on Quanta & Qualia; Materialism & Spiritualism; Science & Religion; Pragmatism & Idealism, etc.
Post 126. August 16, 2022
Is Consciousness Everywhere?
Panpsychism vs Personal Psyche
The IIT theory assumes that consciousness is not a supernatural power, or the universal Mind of a global god. Although, "IIT shares many insights with panpsychism", it is not identical to that ancient conjecture. He quotes philosopher John Searle, "Consciousness cannot spread over the universe like a thin veneer of jam; there has to be a point where my consciousness ends and yours begins." Therefore, "any conscious experience is definite, with borders." That’s because a recognizable system must have unambiguous boundaries. And, to be a self-aware system, it must be self-defined, to distinguish itself from other selves. In philosophy, a universal or global (whole) system is made-up of a hierarchy of sub-ordinate “holons”⁶ (part-wholes), each with its own peculiar properties & qualities.
Koch notes that traditional “Panpsychism has nothing intelligible to say about consciousness in machines. But IIT does. Conventional digital computers, built out of circuit components with sparse connectivity and little overlap among their inputs and their outputs, do not constitute a Whole”. Therefore, he concludes that “consciousness is not in digital computers running software, even when they speak in tongues. Ever-more powerful machines will trade in fake consciousness, which will, perhaps, fool most. But precisely because of the looming confrontation between natural, evolved and artificial, engineered intelligence, it is absolutely essential to assert the central role of feeling to a lived life”. Since sentience is manifested only in animated matter, it is directly associated with, and a feature of “Life Itself”. So, Mind emerges from self-interested Life, not from soulless Mechanism.
Koch is also dubious about collective consciousness. “IIT’s exclusion postulate⁷ does not permit the simultaneous existence of both individual and group mind.Thus, the Anima Mundi or world soul is ruled out, as it requires that the mind of all sentient beings be extinguished in favor of the all-encom-passing soul. Likewise, it does not feel like anything to be the three hundred million citizens of the United States of America” In that case, it would seem that consciousness is limited to living organisms, and does not spread to abstract cultural organizations. Yet, some like to think that planet Earth, imagined as GAIA, is actually a super-organism⁸. At the moment though, there is no evidence to support that concept. Perhaps, the EEG measurement technology for IIT can be scaled-up to test the sentience of inhabited planets, solar systems, and universes.
To distinguish his theory of mind from other neuroscientists, who view neurons as the basic element of consciousness, Koch says, "It is the irreducible Whole that forms my conscious experience, not the underlying neurons." Therefore, he concludes that“IIT offers a principled, coherent, testable, and elegant account of the relationship between these two seemingly disparate domains of existence — the physical and the mental — grounded in extrinsic and intrinsic causal powers.” In the Enformationism thesis, Generic Information⁹ is the common denominator that connects & relates all things into whole systems.
End of Blog Post 126
6. Holon : “A holon is something that is simultaneously a whole in and of itself, as well as a part of a larger whole. . . . A holon is something that has integrity and identity while simultaneously being a part of a larger system; it is a sub-system of a greater system.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holon_(philosophy)
7. Exclusion Postulate : “IIT interprets the exclusion axiom—that any conscious system is in one conscious state only, excluding all others—as implying a postulate that holds that, at the level of the physical system, there be no “double counting” of consciousness.” https://iep.utm.edu/integrated-information-theory-of-consciousness/
In his 1907 book Creative Evolution, Henri Bergson, tried to explain how the physical world can change form over time and self-organize ; eventually resulting in Life & Mind. He labeled the hypo-thetical force propelling such non-mechanical effects as a Vital Principle . Like the ancient notion of Anima Mundi(world soul) to explain what animates matter and what causes Conscious-ness to emerge. Both of these speculations have fallen out of favor, due to the technological success of the reductive methods and mechanical explanations of how Nature works. However, the scientific approach has so far failed to explain the mysterious “quantum leaps” from Physics to Animation to Sentience. So, I propose an updated philo-sophical term : “En-Form-Action”. http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html
“precisely because of the looming confrontation between natural, evolved and artificial, engineered intelligence, it is absolutely essential to assert the central role of feeling to a lived life.”
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