alt Hacker News> Do you really think that postulating a non-physical system that we can't describe in physical terms (red is not a wavelength)
There's no mystery about what "red" is - even computers have an internal representation of sensor data, and our minds certainly do as well. "Red" is a representation of some physical state which is also, presumably, physically encoded in the brain. This is what Chalmers classifies as one of the "easy problems" of consciousness - there's no mystery here.
The hard problem is that we have a conscious experience of color, along with everything else we're conscious of. Whereas we don't generally assume that a computer executing code such as "if color == red ..." is having a conscious experience while it executes that code. (Although panpsychists may believe that.)
> somehow magically creates a new dimension of "feeling" when the bits are arranged in the "right order" is less complex than the hypothesis consciousness forms arranges itself into "structures" in much the same way as matter does?
That's not a hypothesis, it's simply handwaving. Both options are, given current knowledge. I wasn't promoting the first option, I was pointing out that if panpsychism requires a theory of how consciousness aggregates, which is similar to what emergence requires in terms of aggregating matter in certain ways, then the whole panpsychist proposal starts seeming like a candidate for Occam's Razor: what is it buying us, other than saying "this can't be explained"?
Your representation of red is _not red_. It's a dual of the hard problem. There is no theoretical path for going from a wavelength of light to the qualia red, and no amount of information about how the brain and perception work will change that. Just because we can state physical correlates of red perception doesn't change the fundamental difference in kind/dimension which at the heart of the hard problem, and any equivalent problems.
Regarding aggregation of consciousness, I think panpsychism buys us an actual experimental paradigm here, and I think people have already been exploring it without realizing it. I'm talking about split brain and "multi-mind" research showing that people have multiple consciousnesses that each take over and drive under different circumstances. The idea that there are multiple separate aggregates in the brain at once that hand off driving the body moment to moment makes total sense under panpsychism, but is a little weird for emergent consciousness theories.