On consciousness (again)

I just listened to Sams pod with David Chalmers on consciousness. They get it almost right about 50 minutes into the show when they talk about panpsychism and the ideas that everything is conscious at some level. What they miss is that they should really (as I have done in a previous blog p lost) define consciousness as interaction. They talk about information processing which is a complicated non-physical (but rather mathematical) concept. The correct concept to use is interaction which is very physical. And with that, everything is conscious. But at different levels.

These ideas also explain in a natural why we as humans cannot grasp how a chair or even a worm can be conscious. The problem is that the kind of interaction these entities takes part of is so vastly different from ours.

In this sense, consciousness is an illusion. It is a local phenomenon in an hierarchical structure of more and more complex interactions. And a consciousness operating as a certain level and with certain complex interactions cannot grasp, or even experience, a consciousness at a vastly different consciousness level.

It is the self-experience of the interactions occurring in a particular physical structure. We as humans can experience cars and chairs. Complex objects and we interact with these. (This is also probably why small children and illiterates attribute consciousness to objects that are not conscious at our level - it is the only thing we understand)

Later in the show Sam and David got into the thoughts on simulated worlds and that perhaps we live in one. This is also in some sense obvious true as I have also discussed before. We have some experience. That is mediated through our senses. But the world in it self (in Kantian terms) is something we can have no real idea about. Thus we do live in a simulation. It is impossible to say something outside of our experience of the world about the world.