Why panpsychism might be the best theory of consciousness | Alex O'Connor
Alex is a very good speaker. But I genuinely can’t fully wrap my head around why this talk had to be laid out. It’s like people at 3 years old didn’t realize that other animals like snails have a completely different experience that is inconceivable to us. When I tell people that I lean toward Panpsychism or idealism or Russellian monism, they laugh and picture atoms worrying about their taxes or some other anthropomorphic idea of subjective experience forced onto things that don’t have brains💀. Like no, the plant doesn’t feel pain and the table doesn’t feel your fingers when you hit it. It baffles me how people have such a limited analytic imagination. The ridiculous thing to me about a physicalist view of consciousness is that you are committed to the view that there was the very first ancestor to have the very first qualitative experience, whose parents were in some sense philosophical zombies. If the first replicators (RNA molecules) did not have any subjective experience, but humans today do, then that conclusion logically must follow. But then as somebody that isn’t a dualist but also takes the stance that only some specific types of material processes have qualitative properties, you have to realize that the qualitative adaption served absolutely no mechanical purpose or darwinian advantage, since material changes are the only physically interactive thing. Now that to me is an extraordinary leap of faith. If we’re talking about who’s view is has the least surface level intuition, I would have to argue that it is definitely physicalism because they are committed to these deducible conclusions.