Found this old draft that I never posted and given my current readings on The Self Illusion it felt like a great time to actually post this and do some more digging on Panpsychism.
This is the second time this week that I’ve stumbled upon the word Panpsychism. If you don’t know the meaning of this word it is basically the idea that consciousness lies within everything. Not just humans, but plants, objects, atoms, quarks etc.
It all depends on information and on that information is organized. The more complicated an information structure (say for instance all the info in a human) the more conscious that thing ends up being.
This amongst many others is a question that Philosophy has been trying to nail down for a long long time. A good video on the subject is here
Out of this video what made me start thinking was the idea of shared consciousness. Are we, you the reader and I the blogger right now, sharing a little bit of the same consciousness just by reading this blog.
In my mind that makes absolute sense. Consciousness can recreate scenarios, surroundings, and context of a given action one has undertaken or will undertake. That context permeates the conscious ether, filling it with life and structure and shapes.
Because your consciousness is right now in the context of my blog, it only makes sense that we up to a point are sharing the same consciousness.
If consciousness is a fundamental law, permeation of it is up to discussion. In my view just like gravity and time are fundamental laws, that doesn’t mean they produce or act in exactly the same way. Time slows down at higher gravitational pull. Gravity is dependant on mass. So can consciousness be dependant on its creator, in this case all beings, whether innate or not. To this idea the concept of consciousness as a product of information structures fits quite well (all this described as a theory in video).
Will it ever be possible to have the subjective be described by the objective ?
Digital Caveman 