RE: Panpsychism is not as crazy as it sounds.
May 15, 2014 at 7:46 pm
(This post was last modified: May 15, 2014 at 8:19 pm by Coffee Jesus.)
(May 15, 2014 at 6:04 pm)Pickup_shonuff Wrote: 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?
Because then I wouldn't be a conscious being, and you wouldn't be asking me these questions. It's selection bias. It's the basis for the anthropic principle.
Consider the question "What's the probability that I would be asking this question right now?" Of course the probability that you are asking this is 1.0, for we already have the information that you are asking this question. To speculate on what the probability would have been, we have to pretend that certain information isn't actually available to us. This is quite an unusual task, and it's unclear how we should go about it. Should we imagine that our knowledge has reverted to what we knew 10 seconds ago, or should we revert even further back in time?
The 10 seconds prior probability of you asking this question was presumably very high because we now know that you did ask it. This is true even if the reason for you asking this question is that you happened to watch channel 69 when they happened to air a philosophy special in which they happened to mention this problem which you so happened to find interesting. It doesn't matter how much effing randomness we throw in, we already know that you did ask us this. Nothing about you asking this question can be taken as an indicitaion that the asking of this question wasn't just a totally effing random freak event.
Edited to add: Occam's razor says that a given simple explanation will be more probable than a given complicated explanation, but it doesn't AFAIK say that the right explanation tends to be simple.
(May 15, 2014 at 6:04 pm)Pickup_shonuff Wrote: It's a peculiar fact that in such a Universe that gets along fine without conscious beings, they arise in this world.
Did there have to be a universe? Maybe there did according to some physical laws, but why are those laws what they are? Why do some things cause or necessitate other things; that is to say, why does there need to be a why?
There didn't have to be casuality, but there is. Causal patterns didn't have to be such that they could necessitate mind, but they are such.
