this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
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Asklemmy
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Interesting but I struggle to see how this hypothesis could ever be proven or disproven. If it can’t actually be tested then I don’t see how it presents more scientific value any other religious or superstitious belief.
I've long been fond of panpsychism, but I think it's less a hypothesis to be "proven" and more just a different way of framing the questions behind what consciousness is and how it can be defined. Under panpsychism consciousness isn't a binary property that some things have and other things don't, it's a continuum from zero to one (and if you count humans as "1" on the consciousness scale it also makes sense to consider values above that - there's no reason to assume that humans are the "most conscious possible" state of being).
So when you're reading about panpsychism and it says something like "individual electrons are conscious", bear in mind that they're proposing considering electrons to be, like, 10^-10 "consciousness units" worth of conscious. It's not like they're actually aware of themselves in some meaningful way like humans are. That's a common "giggle factor" problem for panpsychism. And it's also not saying that any arbitrary larger-scale structure us "more conscious" than humans, the way that the components of a large-scale structure interact is super important. A rock is not equivalently as "conscious" as a human brain even if they have the same number of particles interacting within them.
I prefer to consider it in terms of "dimensions of awareness". Humans have evolved hundreds, possibly thousands, of interlinked dimensions of awareness for just about everything from colors to body language. Simple automated systems with sensors have their own dimensions of awareness, from vision to heat to pressure. Whatever it is that they track and respond to. AI, however, is finally hitting the point where these dimensions of awareness are being stacked and linked together (GPT5 can see, hear, read, and respond) and it's only a matter of time and agency (aka executive functioning) before we see true AI consciousness.
I had a similar thought recently actually, that consciousness is more than the brain. Is gt4 conscious? Eh, I don't believe anyone knows what that means but is it comparable to human consciousness? I don't think so, but how could it be? It senses words, so it knows words, so it speaks words.
I hear it said all the time that llm's don't really understand what they're talking about, but they seem to understand as well as they can given the dimensions they are aware of, using your terminology. I mean how can I describe anything myself without sensory details? It sounds like. It looks like. It feels like. It behaves like. We got all that knowledge by sensing, then infering. There's no special sauce that creates understanding from nothing.
I don't have any links but imo the experiences of people who were born without a sense, and especially those who were later able to gain it back, strongly supports this idea that something can only be conceptualized in the terms that it was sensed in.