Panpsychism is not as crazy as it sounds.

[Coffee Jesus]

I'm open to the possibility that some mental states persist even after the brain stops working.
We know that some brain damage partitions brain functioning, as with split-brain or blind-sight patients, but we only know that it's partitioning because we can interact with the other partition. If we couldn't interact with the other partition, we might unjustly assume that it simply stopped functioning. Maybe brain death is really just pervasive partitioning.
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If you think mental states entail the entity's ability to communicate those states, then you're tying all mental states to language processing, which occurs in specialized parts of the brain.

As such we don't even need to invoke unconsciousness, merely point out that whilst we may be conscious of light in the visible wavelengths, exactly how conscious are we of infrared, radio, ultraviolet and gamma radiation?
We have evolved specific sensory receptors that enable us to detect specific stimuli and via the neural network respond to them.
Thus I conclude that the table is unaware and unconscious of any stimuli I might present.
Of course I can make this interesting;

As with your brain via your eyes, the table is influenced by radiation. The difference is that the table fails to respond to this information because it can't make sense of it.

[Coffee Jesus]

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.

[Anomalocaris]

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.

[Coffee Jesus]

Putting aside my difficulties in defining consciousness in the first place, I found the panpsychism thing compelling for a while. An observational fact which led me to discard the idea again is how easily we lose consciousness. For it to be present, the brain has to function very well, and minor disturbances such as interference from chemicals or electricity lets us lose it. This to me points to consciousness as an emergent phenomenon of feedback circuits i.e. your first category. If consciousness were somehow a deep property of the matter I am made of, I would not expect it to kick the bucket only because there's some C2H5OH around.

If this is not an argument against panpsychism in your sense, I'd be gratetful if you explained where I go wrong.

Mental states can be forgotten. The C2H5OH impaired your ability to process the mental states into long-term memory.

[Hegel]

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.

The world is as crazy as it actually is.

[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.

[Coffee Jesus]

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.

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.

[Mudhammam]

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.

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.

Coffee, your response seems to be directed towards a different question. As to why our Universe is this way and not some other way, I don't think it is quite the same question as to the probability of it being one way or another, in which I agree with your analysis. But the suggestion put forth by panpsychists isn't so much to address why there is this Universe with intelligence versus others, but to try and figure what those intelligent properties actually are that makes them fundamentally different from other objects, such as is the case with an organ that can think, "I am a person, one who feels to various degrees distinct from the organ doing the thinking!" versus organs that just pump blood or oxygen; or even other neural systems of grading complexity such as that found in the earthworm, which hardly seem to be possess what we understand to be the phenomenon of mind.

[Coffee Jesus]

I wasn't off-topic. I was still responding to this bit from the OP.

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?

Knowing that there is consciousness, we can't say that consciousness must have appeared because of the principles of evolution (random mutation + natural selection). We can only say that it must have appeared somehow, even if through the interaction of dozens upon dozens of "random" forces.

With the post hoc knowledge that consciousness did appear, we can say that it probably had a high probability of appearing (allowing for quantum randomness, of course), but we cannot say that consciousness should be probable even if we're pretending to not know things that we really do know, like what evolution is going to produce. You can't place yourself at the dawn of biological life, then say, "We have to imagine that we don't know whether evolution will produce consciousness, but consciousness has to be probable because we know evolution is going to produce it." The implicit assumption is that evolution alone is responsible for consciousness. Consciousness could be due to the interaction of dozens upon dozens of "random" forces that are unrelated to the theory of evolution. The fact that it did happen doesn't indicate that the explanation has to be simple, i.e. that the event had to follow from just a few basic assumptions.

[Mudhammam]

I wasn't off-topic. I was still responding to this bit from the OP.

[quote='Pickup_shonuff' pid='645245' dateline='1396742910']
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?

Ah, sorry, I must have had a brain fart.

Knowing that there is consciousness, we can't say that consciousness must have appeared because of the principles of evolution (random mutation + natural selection).

I'm inclined to agree but I can see where a plausible argument might be made to the contrary. The mind is still greatly misunderstood. It seems hard to reconcile classical determinism with the phenomenon of consciousness, its causal functions (e.g. such thoughts propelling one to action) secondary at best, probably inessential, as a reductionist model of the brain explains more and more.

We can only say that it must have appeared somehow, even if through the interaction of dozens upon dozens of "random" forces.

By random forces, we're actually talking about Darwinian selection, are we not? In which case, it makes sense that nature would select for intelligence but not necessarily consciousness (think computer).

With the post hoc knowledge that consciousness did appear, we can say that it probably had a high probability of appearing (allowing for quantum randomness, of course), but we cannot say that consciousness should be probable even if we're pretending to not know things that we really do know, like what evolution is going to produce. You can't place yourself at the dawn of biological life, then say, "We have to imagine that we don't know whether evolution will produce consciousness, but consciousness has to be probable because we know evolution is going to produce it." The implicit assumption is that evolution alone is responsible for consciousness. Consciousness could be due to the interaction of dozens upon dozens of "random" forces that are unrelated to the theory of evolution. The fact that it did happen doesn't indicate that the explanation has to be simple, i.e. that the event had to follow from just a few basic assumptions.

Whether or not consciousness is a local cosmic accident via the atoms that created the first life forms, that then evolved to produce brains like ours, or something deeply embedded in the fundamental structure of the Universe that guarantees it's arrival at some point in the history of time, seems like a pretty open ended question.