I am not an expert in panpsychism, but for what I know:

1) the idea that everything has a degree of consciousness proportional to its complexity, introduces the problem of compound consciousness. How do they compose, how is each consciousness contributing to the overall, upper-level one? how is experience explained at the different complexity levels?

2) it is impossible to test whether something is conscious or not

3) the theory is more a philosophical framework for dealing with the mind/body problem, but it actually moves the problem forward on the assumption that 'because it is something physical, it has consciousness. Then complex things have complex consciousness'

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CuriouslyC 10 days ago | parent [-]

1 is an open question, but it's an easier question than the ones related to emergence, since it reduces from "how do we detect emergence of consciousness" (to which people have settled for behavioral tests, hence the whole AI consciousness kerfuffle) to "how do we correlate physical coupling with assumed (human) consciousness." This framing admits study via sleep/brainwave/dreaming/sedation experiments, though there are still things like large scale quantum coupling we can't easily measure.

2 is a problem for any theory of consciousness.

Regarding 3, I'm not certain "complex things have complex consciousness" is assumed, at least not for all definitions of complex. A crystal might be very complex from a structural standpoint but simple from a temporal evolution standpoint. I don't think there's a unified panpsychist perspective there. From my perspective, it's more a parsimonious rejection of materialist emergence hypotheses than a definitive statement of knowledge.

	▲	f_klem 10 days ago \| parent [-]
		1) I think that is precisely the flaw: it is reductionist. 2) how do you actually measure if a rock has consciousness? if you redefine consciousness as simply some kind of physical manifestation, like radiance or quantum fluctuation (measured as compound at the macro-level), then you will have to redefine what we understand as 'human consciousness' is, otherwise it will be a characteristic so generic that won't be useful at all. Then this new characteristic will suffer from the same original interpretation problem... So at least the panspychism approach is just evading the main problem. 3) I would argue that the only way of thinking about a complex consciousness emerging from a diverse and vast set of things, is considering complexity. If it is not complexity (like, structurally complex things can have simple consciousness and the other way around) then there must be something, material or not, that provides for the emergence of such complex consciousness. This is rather tricky: you will need to postulate some kind of non-physical (or not discovered yet) characteristic that generates consciousness, or you will have to come up with some causal relation between non-related-to-complexity but still-related-to-physicality and complex consciousness, which from our current physics framework might not be possible.