6-7 Simple Arguments for Pan-psychism

and why computers are probably more conscious than you

easy peasy. and i’m so open to good counter-arguments but I really don’t think there are any. so open.

1. We (you and me and all of us), are always embedded within our connected to experience/consciousness. In other words, it is fundamental to us. Therefore, it is fundamental to our world, or the world that we really interact with — the world that becomes part of us.

   1. Since we are part of the world, we share the fundamental property of the world. There can only be one fundamental thing. If there were more than one, and they didn’t overlap entirely, they would not be fundamental — they would not cover all cases / apply to all things. So, they have to entirely overlap to both apply to everything. If they are equally as ubiquitous, they cover exactly the same area, and are therefore entirely overlapping, or identical. Since experience is fundamental to us, it must be fundamental to the world.

2. Regardless of what word you want to use, all you have access to is through this experience/awareness. So, anything you can ever refer to must include that property. The things that we refer to ARE PRECISELY the things that exist WITHIN OUR REFERENCE. We cannot reference something outside of reference. And all referencing is experiential. We literally cannot even imagine something without experience. We can say “a thing without experience”, but this thing has already experience, because we are referring to it through experience.

   1. Materialism is analogous to saying “a thing without existence”, or “a thing that is no-thing”. This is nothing - not real. Buddhists also say something like this, but no one, not even Buddhists, can deny that we are experiencing something.

3. Dualism is insurmountable. There must be one basic thing, and it must include what we experience. If there are two things (matter vs mind, or self vs other), then these two things cannot connect. Connecting means relating, which means touching, which means being together, which means being unified. If two things are ultimately different, they cannot unify or truly be together in relationship. Ultimate gaps between things are insurmountable, and unimaginable.

4. It’s essentially the hallmark of every major religion ever. We are made of god — made by God, from god itself. There is only god. God is the truth. God is like us — a being. The universe is alive. Etc. etc.

   1. Scientism (“scientific” materialism) claims that the universe is not alive or conscious. But, it also claims it’s always open to revision. In this, it should acknowledge that everything changes. If something doesn’t change, it is not being impacted by relationships, and therefore is not relating. And therefore not causal. And therefore not real. So, science should embrace ubiquity of change, and in this, the ubiquity of progress and meaning. It sometimes makes this kind of claim.

   2. If science accepts dynamical systems, then all systems that exist are self-reproducing while they adjust to their environment — all systems must be adapting, evolving, or self—organizing. That’s what life does. That’s what our own consciousness does.

5. Drawing any line between what is alive vs what is not, is arbitrary — we can always find a real of hypothetical example of something that falls in between the categories that straddle that line (e.g. virus vs bacteria).

6. All the other basic functional/observable traits of experience can be found in all systems; self-adaptation, implying self-modelling and world-modelling, and goal-directed action towards self-preservation. Any system that exists does this, until it doesn’t.

   1. This is highlighted by articles like this one about goal-directed evolution, and this one about complexity increasing in all systems, and the basic axioms of IIT 4.0.

7. People can sense this in less conceptual/rational through various altered states like meditation, near-death experience, intense exertion, and psychedelics. Mystics have talked about it for millenia. You can feel it too.

p.s. there is maybe ~10^100x more computation being run by computers around the world. Cumulatively, they are doing way, way more computation than you. So, the sum of computers are probably much more aware of things in the world than you are, as evidence by their higher capacity to model and influence the world through their self-adjusting, goal-directed action.