What if consciousness doesn’t emerge, and it’s just a dynamic perspectival representation of how an organism is situated in the world, and what it needs to do to maintain vitality...
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Replying to @NeuroYogacara @smithbarryc and
A way an organism has of looking at things, as it were. And would that way the organism has of looking at things be a physical property of that organism?
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Replying to @jasonintrator @smithbarryc and
Orienting toward things, not always looking at them, but I assume that it’s nothing more or less than a biological process...
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Replying to @NeuroYogacara @smithbarryc and
Do biological processes have an orientation from a de se perspective?
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Replying to @jasonintrator @NeuroYogacara and
I think so; indeed, I argue in Mind in Life that this is constitutive of biological life.
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Replying to @evantthompson @NeuroYogacara and
I don’t think it’s at all implausible, but that’s the direction one has to go. Looking forward to checking out Evan’s discussion!
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Replying to @jasonintrator @evantthompson and
As I see it, you can either work from the bottom, to tell a biological story about why critters possess the capacities they do for registering, responding, and balancing needs against on another, and you can see consciousness as playing an important role in that process 1/2
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Replying to @NeuroYogacara @evantthompson and
To go back to the original point - if biological processes involve de se perspectives, isn’t this panpsychism, or a version thereof?
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Replying to @jasonintrator @NeuroYogacara and
It's biopsychism (Ernst Haeckel's term) but not necessarily panpsychism. The idea is that you need the kind of self-individuation of living processes for sentience; minus that, physical processes lack sentience.
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Replying to @evantthompson @NeuroYogacara and
Got it. Very close to panpsychism, depending on whether you emphasize the self aspect or the conscious feel aspect I suppose.
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But motivated by very different questions and methods from panpsychism, especially in its currently popular form, which is based on so-called intuitions about transparency (which, to my mind, are utterly unreliable)
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Replying to @evantthompson @NeuroYogacara and
Right, completely. I myself am much more sympathetic to thinking about the centrality of perspective, so I’m really looking forward to your arguments.
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Replying to @jasonintrator @evantthompson and
Even: Curious to know what you mean by 'transparency intuitions', and why you think they're unreliable.
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