Panpsychism is not as crazy as it sounds.

[Mudhammam]

Epiphenomenalism seems to run into a Darwinian problem. If consciousness is basically useless, perhaps a "byproduct" of other functions, why did/does evolution select for it? These are all questions I'm sure you have discussed countless times before but have you considered panpsychism?

I am a conscious entity because I couldn't be any other kind of entity.

Why not? Couldn't you be an automated molecular machine that makes intelligent statements such as "I am a conscious entity" and yet have no more conscious experience than the latest version of Siri does? That is, your mind is but electrochemical neural currents that create this sense of being, as a person, a subject rather an object with feelings that you identify as yours, with a unique sense or ability to reflect on your own reflection... but many organisms get along fine with ostensibly no concept of a self. It's a peculiar fact that in such a Universe that gets along fine without conscious beings, they arise in this world. Does this speak to something deeper within the fundamental nature of the matter that are derived from? What is it about carbon atoms in particular? Or is that just carbon chauvinism? Can there be "rock people" somewhere else in the Universe? That would be even more remarkable as a suggestion for panpsychism.

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RE: Panpsychism is not as crazy as it sounds.

I am not sure how crazy it sounds to you, but it sounds just as crazy to me as it actually is.

You're dismissing something as just being crazy, without any qualifiers, and expecting your opinion to be arbitrarily accepted with a degree of seriousness that exceeds philosophers as brilliant and diverse as Thales, Plato, Spinoza, Leibniz and William James, all who could be considered to hold some form of panpsychism. I think I'll at least consider what Spinoza and James have to say.