Quantum Theory proves consciousness moves on after death?

[Alan V]

What's it conscious of?

Similarly, we can ask "What specifically is conscious?"  The answer is: the physical body is conscious -- the eyes, the ears, the tongue, the nose, the nerves, the brain -- not some "consciousness atoms" which couldn't even be big enough to register and translate waves of light or sound.

[SYZ]

...The truth is that many scientists agree with panpsychism but they're scared of speaking out for fear of being laughed at.

Scientists are not "scared" of speaking about panpsychism. Professor John Rogers Searle
states that panpsychism is an "absurd view" and that thermostats lack "enough structure even
to be a remote candidate for consciousness."

The main arguments against panpsychism:

•  Unnecessary/untestable claims and entities: There cannot be, even in principle, any test to
see if mental properties exist in any physical system other than our mind, and we don't need
to assume their existence in order to understand reality.

•  Combination problem: The mental properties we experience personally apparently involve a
unique self/mind that we agree to be linked to the physical behaviour of a brain, yet the brain
is a combination of several parts; the problem being that, assuming mind is everywhere it must
be in all these parts, how does it happen that all these several minds combine into what seems
to be just one single mind?

Panpsychism is unfalsifiable because there is no way to detect if, say, a rock had a conscious
experience. In the case of humans or other animals, we can explore consciousness and its
relation to neurology through behavioural and anatomical studies. The same does not apply to
inert matter.  Panpsychism may be a solution in search of a problem as it commits a category
mistake similar to dualism by presuming consciousness is to be found as part of or a property
of matter itself rather than as an abstract notion referring to certain patterns of interaction
among matter. Thus, panpsychism tends to live mostly in pure philosophy and woo-related fields.

—RationalWiki Sep 2018

[LastPoet]

I can move montains, bounce quarks and piss against the wind with the power of my mind.

It's called having an imagination.

[Alan V]

Professor John Rogers Searle states that panpsychism is an "absurd view" and that thermostats lack "enough structure even to be a remote candidate for consciousness."

For those who don't understand the reference, philosopher David Chalmers argued that even thermostats might be considered conscious, since they register and respond to external stimuli.  

However, I take that to be a reductio ad absurdum of a certain definition of consciousness.  There's a bit more involved.

[Dānu]

It's possible that Lanza and these people are right in their conclusions. The matter is unsettled. And a bad argument can have a true conclusion. However the confidence these people have in their conclusions is unwarranted, and a symptom of general irrationality. The smart money is betting otherwise, but it's still a gamble. What is problematic is these people gambling on a long shot and assuring us it's a sure thing.

[Dānu]

If consciousness is some sort of atomistic, independent entity, then I'd like to know where it goes when I am asleep or unconscious, and what it does while it is there.

[Mark]

I think any realistic kind of afterlife would have to be a return to whatever was experienced, by whatever entity, before birth. The idea of our consciousness persisting with the same sort of complexity as it had before our death, despite the fact that our brain died, seems absurd to me. If there's no consciousness before birth then there's no consciousness after. If there's consciousness before birth then there's consciousness after. In any case it isn't really our consciousness. 

If there is consciousness in the quantum world it's not some sort of wooy super intelligence where human-like minds are floating around in the quantum realm. And it's not evidence of some sort of super intelligence or that the universe has a mind. It's instead a watered down consciousness so watered down that it's almost zero. And we're not talking about watered down human consciousness because even the most trace element of human consciousness is still experienced in the way that humans experience consciousness. We're talking about some sort of watered down experfience that we could never really understand as humans because it is so close to zero and so unlike our own human experience.

I hear you saying that most likely any sort of persistence of consciousness is bullshit.  I don't pretend to understand anything about a quantum realm but I understand you as roughly saying "if anyone has demonstrated any sort of quantum effects associated with consciousness which persist after death then that's all they are".  To use a non-quantum example, the points of light we see in the sky and call stars are not the stars themselves but only some of the light they have emitted which continues on its merry way even after the star is no more.

But then I wonder why you call yourself a panpsychist.  Is it that you think everything exhibits psychic activity?  I personally associate that with any organism with the cognitive capacity to make use of sensory input to make better choices.  I'm not sure at what point 'subjecthood' is achieved but any such organism is on a continuum which leads to subjective experience.  But I don't think inorganic things have psychic experience.  Do you?

[SYZ]

Is this evidence for panpsychism?

[Mark]

Is this evidence for panpsychism?

Or just evidence of hyperactive pan psychic projection?

[Vera]

When spring comes
If I’m dead,
The flowers will bloom in the same manner
And the trees will be no less green than last spring.
Reality does not need me.

I feel a great joy
To think that my death is of no importance

If I knew I would die tomorrow
And the spring was the day after tomorrow
I would die happy because spring was the day after tomorrow.
If this is her time, when she had only come in time?
I like that everything is real and everything is right;
And because it would be like, even though I did not like.
So if i die now, I die happy,
Because everything is real and everything is right.

Pray in Latin over my coffin, if you will.
If you want , dance and sing around it.
I have no preferences for when we can not have preferences.
Whatever, whenever, that is what it is.

Fernando Pessoa

(not the best of translations, but yeah, reality has no need for me, quantum (the most meaningless word in the all the languages of the world, sadly) theor or not quantum theory, and once I'm gone, I'm gone...)

[LastPoet]

When spring comes
If I’m dead,
The flowers will bloom in the same manner
And the trees will be no less green than last spring.
Reality does not need me.

I feel a great joy
To think that my death is of no importance

If I knew I would die tomorrow
And the spring was the day after tomorrow
I would die happy because spring was the day after tomorrow.
If this is her time, when she had only come in time?
I like that everything is real and everything is right;
And because it would be like, even though I did not like.
So if i die now, I die happy,
Because everything is real and everything is right.

Pray in Latin over my coffin, if you will.
If you want , dance and sing around it.
I have no preferences for when we can not have preferences.
Whatever, whenever, that is what it is.

Fernando Pessoa

(not the best of translations, but yeah, reality has no need for me, quantum (the most meaningless word in the all the languages of the world, sadly) and once I'm gone, I'm gone...)

It's hard to translate, but its good enough.

Was that Ricardo Reis, Alvaro Campos or Alberto Caeiro? 

[brewerb]

According to Dr. Robert Lanza

A book titled “Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the Nature of the Universe” has stirred up the Internet, because it contained a notion that life does not end when the body dies, and it can last forever. The author of this publication, scientist Dr. Robert Lanza who was voted the 3rd most important scientist alive by the NY Times, has no doubts that this is possible.

[Minimalist]

The truth is that many scientists agree with panpsychism but they're scared of speaking out for fear of being laughed at.

That might be up there with "scholars agree there was a historical jesus" and then when you look into you find out that they are a collection of theologians with divinity degrees.  


Luckily, there is hope for the future!

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019...ty-faculty

Cuts at Liberty Hit Divinity

Divinity is chopping faculty slots and has lost students steadily in recent years at evangelical university, which has long said religion is central to its programs.

When even the dumb fucks who go to Liberty abandon this god shit you know the end is near!

[Vera]

When spring comes
If I’m dead,
The flowers will bloom in the same manner
And the trees will be no less green than last spring.
Reality does not need me.

I feel a great joy
To think that my death is of no importance

If I knew I would die tomorrow
And the spring was the day after tomorrow
I would die happy because spring was the day after tomorrow.
If this is her time, when she had only come in time?
I like that everything is real and everything is right;
And because it would be like, even though I did not like.
So if i die now, I die happy,
Because everything is real and everything is right.

Pray in Latin over my coffin, if you will.
If you want , dance and sing around it.
I have no preferences for when we can not have preferences.
Whatever, whenever, that is what it is.

Fernando Pessoa

(not the best of translations, but yeah, reality has no need for me, quantum (the most meaningless word in the all the languages of the world, sadly) and once I'm gone, I'm gone...)

It's hard to translate, but its good enough.

Was that Ricardo Reis, Alvaro Campos or Alberto Caeiro? 

Alberto Caeiro I think. Or Alvaro Campos. 'twas an AC guy for sure.

""“My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while. […]. I'm two, and both keep their distance — Siamese twins that aren't attached.”

[Chas]

I'm a panpsychist and many people see that as intuitively absurd and they mistake it for new age nonsense. They don't actually have an argument against it, though.

The truth is that many scientists agree with panpsychism but they're scared of speaking out for fear of being laughed at.

There's no good argument for it.  
It is a laughable idea born of ignorance of how brains works and what consciousness is.

When consciousness without a brain can be demonstrated, I'll reconsider the thesis.

[Mark]

I'm a panpsychist and many people see that as intuitively absurd and they mistake it for new age nonsense. They don't actually have an argument against it, though.

The truth is that many scientists agree with panpsychism but they're scared of speaking out for fear of being laughed at.

There's no good argument for it.  
It is a laughable idea born of ignorance of how brains works and what consciousness is.

When consciousness without a brain can be demonstrated, I'll reconsider the thesis.

Perhaps you remember that Wooters guy's notion that consciousness was something sent into the natural world where it could be received by brains in the way a radio could pick up radio waves.  Such an extravagant, Rube Goldberg-esque theory.  I doubt Evie has anything like that in mind but he doesn't appear ready to clarify.

[Free]

According to Dr. Robert Lanza

A book titled “Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the Nature of the Universe” has stirred up the Internet, because it contained a notion that life does not end when the body dies, and it can last forever. The author of this publication, scientist Dr. Robert Lanza who was voted the 3rd most important scientist alive by the NY Times, has no doubts that this is possible.

No.

Just no.

Consciousness is not some separate entity of the human condition, and just like the rest of the human body, it also will transform and the information will scatter from the body and be absorbed into the next, likely numerous, states of existence.

Bottom line. The fucker is advocating for a soul.

Fuck that.

[EvieTheAvocado]

If there is consciousness in the quantum world it's not some sort of wooy super intelligence where human-like minds are floating around in the quantum realm. And it's not evidence of some sort of super intelligence or that the universe has a mind. It's instead a watered down consciousness so watered down that it's almost zero. And we're not talking about watered down human consciousness because even the most trace element of human consciousness is still experienced in the way that humans experience consciousness. We're talking about some sort of watered down experfience that we could never really understand as humans because it is so close to zero and so unlike our own human experience.

What's it conscious of?

We're talking about some sort of watered down experience that we could never really understand as humans because it is so close to zero and so unlike our own human experience.

Bold added.

In contemporary philosophy, panpsychism is offered as a naturalistic solution to various problems inherent in classical physicalism;

1. Eliminativism denies internal existence (including qualia; such as the redness of red, or the specific taste of an apple, as distinct from the neural processes/information representing these experiences). While popular amongst some philosophers, eliminativism goes against human intuition; existing beliefs regarding the sentience of intelligent biological systems (given that the agent/"software" encoded in the brain has evolved to believe that it is conscious; see self-directed theory of mind).
2. Reductive physicalism reduces mental properties to physical properties, such as the firing of individual neurons. This prospect is becoming increasingly unlikely based on neuroscientific research concerning how information processing mapped to specific mental events is distributed across neural networks (multiple physical events).
3. Non-reductive physicalism assumes that mental reality supervenes on physical reality; that although there is a correspondence between mental and physical events, their mapping is not 1 to 1. Mental properties under non-reductive physicalism are seen to be emergent, that given the right physical conditions they will arise (see Chalmers on strong emergence). Emergent mental properties are however redundant to the evolution and function of the physical system (see Jaegwon Kim on overdetermination).

Panpsychism 1. does not attempt to deny internal existence (eliminativism), 2. takes into account current neuroscientific findings regarding the distribution of information (unlike classical reductive physicalism), and 3. does not suffer from the problems (barring teleology) inherent in the emergence of redundant mental properties at specific points in space-time. It may be that we need to reconceptualise physical properties to facilitate their reduction to mental properties however (in the case of panpsychism/the combination problem), or at the very least; to reduce mental properties to physical properties (eg as probability waves; Dawkins).

Source: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Panpsychism

[EvieTheAvocado]

I'm a panpsychist and many people see that as intuitively absurd and they mistake it for new age nonsense. They don't actually have an argument against it, though.

The truth is that many scientists agree with panpsychism but they're scared of speaking out for fear of being laughed at.

There's no good argument for it.  
It is a laughable idea born of ignorance of how brains works and what consciousness is.

When consciousness without a brain can be demonstrated, I'll reconsider the thesis.

Nobody has any evidence of anything non-experiential and nobody has any good argument for conscious experience arising from totally non-conscious experience. Evolution works in gradual steps and the standard view assumes that non-conscious stuff exists without any evidence whatsoever and it assumes a sort of radical emergence that goes completely against the way science explains anything else. The best argument for panpsychism is that the alternative, the standard view, that consciousness is either an illusion or it radically emerges without any evidence for that whatsoever, is completely illogical. And illogical is worse than counterintuitive.

All people have against panpsychism is "That sounds crazy!" but they haven't actually got any evidence or argument. We know some stuff involves experience, we have no evidence to the contrary, and science normally explains things in reductionist ways so why hold an exception of radical emergence for no justifiable reason?

As for the view that consciousness is an illusion or doesn't exist ... that's literally the craziest idea ever. The whole universe as we experience it could be an illusion and we could be brains in vats ... or we could be in The Matrix. But one thing we know for sure is that we are experiencing something[:

What is the silliest claim ever made? The competition is fierce, but I think the answer is easy. Some people have denied the existence of consciousness: conscious experience, the subjective character of experience, the “what-it-is-like” of experience. Next to this denial—I’ll call it “the Denial”—every known religious belief is only a little less sensible than the belief that grass is green.

The Denial began in the twentieth century and continues today in a few pockets of philosophy and psychology and, now, information technology. It had two main causes: the rise of the behaviorist approach in psychology, and the naturalistic approach in philosophy. These were good things in their way, but they spiraled out of control and gave birth to the Great Silliness. I want to consider these main causes first, and then say something rather gloomy about a third, deeper, darker cause. But before that, I need to comment on what is being denied—consciousness, conscious experience, experience for short.

What is it? Anyone who has ever seen or heard or smelled anything knows what it is; anyone who has ever been in pain, or felt hungry or hot or cold or remorseful, dismayed, uncertain, or sleepy, or has suddenly remembered a missed appointment. All these things involve what are sometimes called “qualia”—that is to say, different types or qualities of conscious experience. What I am calling the Denial is the denial that anyone has ever really had any of these experiences.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that most Deniers deny that they’re Deniers. “Of course, we agree that consciousness or experience exists,” they say—but when they say this they mean something that specifically excludes qualia.

Who are the Deniers? I have in mind—at least—those who fully subscribe to something called “philosophical behaviorism” as well as those who fully subscribe to something called “functionalism” in the philosophy of mind. Few have been fully explicit in their denial, but among those who have been, we find Brian Farrell, Paul Feyerabend, Richard Rorty, and the generally admirable Daniel Dennett. Ned Block once remarked that Dennett’s attempt to fit consciousness or “qualia” into his theory of reality “has the relation to qualia that the US Air Force had to so many Vietnamese villages: he destroys qualia in order to save them.”

One of the strangest things the Deniers say is that although it seems that there is conscious experience, there isn’t really any conscious experience: the seeming is, in fact, an illusion. The trouble with this is that any such illusion is already and necessarily an actual instance of the thing said to be an illusion. Suppose you’re hypnotized to feel intense pain. Someone may say that you’re not really in pain, that the pain is illusory, because you haven’t really suffered any bodily damage. But to seem to feel pain is to be in pain. It’s not possible here to open up a gap between appearance and reality, between what is and what seems.

Some people not only deny the existence of consciousness; they also claim not to know what is being presumed to exist. Block responds to these deniers by quoting the reply Louis Armstrong is said to have given to those who asked him what jazz was (some people credit Fats Waller): “If you got to ask, you ain’t never gonna get to know.” Another response is almost as good, although it’s condemned by some who follow Wittgenstein. If someone asks what conscious experience is, you say, “You know what it is from your own case.” (You can add, “Here’s an example,” and give them a sharp kick.) When it comes to conscious experience, there’s a rock-bottom sense in which we’re fully acquainted with it just in having it. The having is the knowing. So when people say that consciousness is a mystery, they’re wrong—because we know what it is. It’s the most familiar thing there is—however hard it is to put into words.

Source: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/13...s-deniers/

[Alan V]

Nobody has any evidence of anything non-experiential and nobody has any good argument for conscious experience arising from totally non-conscious experience. Evolution works in gradual steps and the standard view assumes that non-conscious stuff exists without any evidence whatsoever and it assumes a sort of radical emergence that goes completely against the way science explains anything else. The best argument for panpsychism is that the alternative, the standard view, that consciousness is either an illusion or it radically emerges without any evidence for that whatsoever, is completely illogical. And illogical is worse than counterintuitive.

All people have against panpsychism is "That sounds crazy!" but they haven't actually got any evidence or argument. We know some stuff involves experience, we have no evidence to the contrary, and science normally explains things in reductionist ways so why hold an exception of radical emergence for no justifiable reason?

As for the view that consciousness is an illusion or doesn't exist ... that's literally the craziest idea ever. The whole universe as we experience it could be an illusion and we could be brains in vats ... or we could be in The Matrix. But one thing we know for sure is that we are experiencing something:

I don't think anyone in this discussion denied the existence of consciousness, so I don't know who you are arguing against with that rather long part of your reply.

If anything, you are the person denying the strong possibility of an alternative perspective by writing "Nobody has any evidence of anything non-experiential and nobody has any good argument for conscious experience arising from totally non-conscious experience."  On the contrary, blind people do not see light.  That is evidence of the non-experiential.  And the universe once contained no life and no brains, since both depend on materials from exploding stars.  That is a good argument for conscious experience arising from totally non-conscious information.

I see nothing radical in how emergentists seek to explain consciousness, as long as you reframe consciousness as a process rather than a substance.  It seems to me that you are reifying consciousness as something other than the symbolic (virtual) representation of realities in brains. Environmental information impacts on biological creatures, whether they perceive it or not.  Those with mutations favoring sensitivity toward such information are selected by evolution.  Eyes have evolved from nothing at all in multiple independent cases.  Such awareness of environmental information is the basis of consciousness.

As for qualia, we are our bodies, so of course we are going to perceive realities subjectively.

[Alan V]

3. does not suffer from the problems (barring teleology) inherent in the emergence of redundant mental properties at specific points in space-time.

Source: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Panpsychism

This is not a problem for emergence theory as long as consciousness is framed as a process rather than a substance, and further as long as consciousness emerged because of evolution and the accumulation of chance mutations, rather than being directly determined by the laws of physics (teleology).

Nor are mental properties redundant with physical properties as long as physical properties had no inherent motivations for the survival of organisms. In other words, the added subjectivities of mental experiences are exactly what gives organisms motivations toward survival.

[EvieTheAvocado]

I don't think anyone in this discussion denied the existence of consciousness, so I don't know who you are arguing against with that rather long part of your reply.

I'm arguing against eliminativism and reductionistic behaviorist functionalism

Just because a view doesn't explicitly deny X doesn't mean that it doesn't implicitly deny X. There are many views that people can hold that when logically taken to its conclusion entail things that they claim to not agree with.

Hence the part about how the deniers deny that they are deniers. Nobody here is going to admit that their view, if true, would entail a nonexistence of consciousness, which makes their view absurd (after all, as soon as they realized that that is what their view entails they'd stop holding it). But that doesn't mean that that's not what they're actually saying. It just means that that's not what they're trying to say. People who express absurd views rarely realize that the views they are expressing are absurd.

[EvieTheAvocado]

This is not a problem for emergence theory as long as consciousness is framed as a process rather than a substance

I don't see what difference it makes. Are you familiar with process theory? The idea that substances ultimately are processes.

Whether consciousness and non-consciousness are substances or processes ... the point is that we only have evidence of the former and not the latter. And we don't have a reductionist explanation for where the cutoff point is.

There's no evidence of how one emerges from the other (again, whether we're talking of substances or processes). And if there's no emergence at all then we're left with either eliminativist, dualism or panpsychism. And panpsychism is much less problematic than the other two.

Why postulate the existence of the non-experiential when nobody has, nor can have, any evidence of any such thing ... even in principle? Evidence is empirical and empiricism is experience-based. It's honestly completely Q.E.D. and the only retort people have is that panpsychism is so counterintuitive that they deem it to be "crazy" or "weird" or "wooey". They haven't actually got an argument. Strawmanning panpsychism is the best people can do (which, by definition, doesn't even address it).

[SYZ]

...All people have against panpsychism is "That sounds crazy!" but they haven't actually got any evidence or argument.

Loosely speaking, panpsychists would have us believe that a rock or a blade of grass
has a simple consciousness—as defined, again loosely, by people in general.

And precisely in the same way that I say God doesn't exist, I say that rocks or grass
don't possess any consciousness.  I have no need to offer any "evidence" that a
supernatural entity does not exist, nor do I have to do that for rocks or grass.

I'd ask you to consider proving that unicorns don't exist, but I'm betting you can't.
Such a belief?  "That sounds crazy".

[Dānu]

I don't think anyone in this discussion denied the existence of consciousness, so I don't know who you are arguing against with that rather long part of your reply.

I'm arguing against eliminativism and reductionistic behaviorist functionalism

Just because a view doesn't explicitly deny X doesn't mean that it doesn't implicitly deny X. There are many views that people can hold that when logically taken to its conclusion entail things that they claim to not agree with.

Hence the part about how the deniers deny that they are deniers. Nobody here is going to admit that their view, if true, would entail a nonexistence of consciousness, which makes their view absurd (after all, as soon as they realized that that is what their view entails they'd stop holding it). But that doesn't mean that that's not what they're actually saying. It just means that that's not what they're trying to say. People who express absurd views rarely realize that the views they are expressing are absurd.

QFT.