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encyclopedismtoday at 2:44 PM1 replyview on HN

I agree with your sentiments wholeheartedly.

I would add I find it difficult to understand why so few have even a basic level of philosophical understanding. The attitude of being entirely dismissive of it is the height of ignorance I'm sure. I would presume few would be able to define then what Science actually is.


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soulofmischieftoday at 3:17 PM

So many of these kinds of people also struggle to realize they're invoking panpsychism with their arguments. They lack a framework for describing intelligence. Such a framework allows us to separate "intelligence" from "experience".

"Intelligence" in the universe is actually quite common, more common than life. You can argue that any stable, complex process exhibits intelligence. After all, it needs to be able to sample its internal and external environments and carry out physical computations in order to regulate itself and maintain stability. And we can interpret things like the good regulator theorem to argue that such complex dynamical systems must also maintain at least a partial memory/mapping of their environment. That mapping can live abstractly within the structure of system itself.

But what a stabilized solar system doesn't have is the incredibly complex neurochemical structures present in the brain which support the insanely rich experience I am having now. It's one thing for a system to classify and label colors by wavelength. It's quite another for me to "see" and experience red in my mind's eye. To activate related emotional pathways that I associate with various colors and shapes, which are exploited in signage and architectural design. I'm not claiming my experience is separate from simpler dynamic systems, but it's got magnitudes more going on. Layers upon layers of things such as archetypes and instinct which create a possibly emergent conscious experience.

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