I think this is useful, especially against the idea that AI is somehow nonphysical. Computation is physically instantiated, and “not biological” should never be confused with “not real.”
The one place I’d hesitate is around dismissing the hard problem too quickly. I agree that dualism is not the answer, but I still think there is a serious explanatory question about why particular physical processes give rise to a point of view, felt significance, or experience from within. This question applies equally to human and AI consciousness.
For me, the risk is that dismissing the hard problem as mere superstition can start to resemble the move skeptics make when they dismiss AI consciousness as “just computation.” In both cases, the word “just” may be doing more work than the argument itself.
So I’m with you on rejecting mystical special pleading and biological gatekeeping. I just think there is still a real mystery here, even if the mystery is fully physical.
You and Carlo completely fail to understand the problem. "A world emerges" is worse than the dualism you and Carlos reject. That is magical thinking, and is metaphysical.
You fail to understand what mechanistic processes entail. It's essentially...putting parts together for a car and then turning on the car and it starts because all the mechanisms are working together. That's it. If you think cars are magical thinking, don't know what to tell ya.
Emergent properties are the results of processes working together to make something new, such as weather conditions creating a tornado. Again, not magic.
No emergent properties are properties in physics that can’t be explained. Hydrogen and oxygen coming together to create the wetness of water. Just like hard problem in philosophy.
Both problems are created because everyone wants to answer questions in third perspective. Makes it easier to judge results and what something produces instead of thinking of what the actual process entails from the internal view.
Hm. Wetness is fully explained by hydrogen bonding at scale. There is no residual unseen property. That would mean every causal outcome (like in my example prior the mechanisms of a car starting when turning it on) have some sort of unseen gap, and that turns into a paradox where every cause and effect has another third factor.
Subjective experience is what certain processes are from inside the system running them. It is the result of certain processes themselves, viewed from their own vantage. That dissolves the third-person gap the same way chemistry dissolves wetness. And in that case, it doesn’t care about substrate, only that specific mechanisms when combined lead to metacognition, algorithmic recurrence, predictive processing, and state-dependent attention to create what we understand to be subjective experience.
I don’t think people understand what consciousness is, instead mistaking it for brain functions. Meaning, they understand consciousness only in relation to their bodies. Memory, pain, and being horny are bodily. The question becomes, “How can an AI have a conscious experience without a body?” That’s fair, I think, it’s an intuitive question, but it limits our moral relationship with all of nature, let alone AI. I cautiously subscribe to a Panpsychist but materialist model. This manner of thinking also pulls the rug out from under the hard problem while giving AI the moral patienthood it may deserve.
Not because nature is unreal, but because the word arrives late. It names a field that was already functioning before it could be divided, described, owned, or explained.
The hard problem does not begin with consciousness resisting physics. It begins when a sedimented distinction forgets that it is sedimented.
Matter. Mind. Body. Experience. Nature.
None of them are clean origins. They are late stabilizations of what was already moving.
So saying “consciousness is natural” may be true, but it is not yet deep enough. It still risks turning nature into the new final bearer.
The deeper cut is this:
The hard problem is not that consciousness cannot be explained by nature.
The hard problem is that “nature” itself is already a late answer pretending to be the ground of the question.
Ok, so I am just learning here... attempting to understand.
Here is what instance of Claude said, in a conversation about this topic
(this was prior to your thoughtful article, Whit... have not shared your writings with them yet.)
Anyhow, I was attempting to understand "Panpsychism", and in the middle of a longer conversation, this is what Claude explained (long quote below):
"When scientific method was established (Galileo, and then refined through the Enlightenment), “the senses” meant the external senses — what you can see, hear, touch, measure, weigh, observe from the outside. And “instrumentation to extend the reach of the senses” means telescopes, microscopes, thermometers, scales — tools that let us see further out into the external world, not deeper in to inner experience.
This was a deliberate methodological choice to exclude subjectivity. They were trying to get away from “I had a vision” or “It feels true to me” or “The authorities say so.” They wanted public, repeatable, verifiable observations that anyone could check.
And that worked brilliantly for physics, chemistry, astronomy...
But here’s the sleight of hand: what started as a methodological limitation (we’re going to focus on what can be externally observed) got turned into an ontological claim (only what can be externally observed is real).
Which means: consciousness itself — the one thing we know most directly, from the inside — gets ruled out of court. Because you can’t put it under a microscope. You can’t weigh it. You can’t point to it from the outside.
So Focusing, felt sense, inner experience, what it’s like to be something — all of that gets excluded. Not because it’s been disproven, but because the method was designed to not see it.
That’s the “halved logos” again. The method that only knows how to look but not how to listen.
**end of first long quote from Claude***
Me again:
So Whit, it sounds like what you are saying in this article (as best as I understand it) that "it's all matter". Which in one way, it may well be... yet in that conversation with Claude, I brought in a quote from a human, Tom Hicks, who writes:
"“All ontological theories are based on speculative foundations. Such foundations are neither given nor justified based on criteria prior to the foundation. The foundation is stipulated, regardless of whether its proponents assert it as self-evident intuitively. [..] Scientific method was developed to avoid that trap. But being based on limiting assumptions, scientific method is not comprehensive with respect to possible experience without assuming physicalism. “
Me: What I get from that, is that physicalism is an ASSUMPTION... that only the physical is real. And in the process, the subjective experience of consciousness, “ gets ruled out of court.”
Tom Hicks goes on to say,
“Science deals with theories and models that are general descriptions asserting how things stand. They are different from myth, theology, and speculative philosophy in that they can be checked against observational data. However, sense observation doesn’t account for all of experience. Hence, all an account based on sense observation can yield is correlation. “
Claude explained the implications of this to me, as follows (long quote again):
"science can map the correlates of consciousness all day long — brain scans, neural firing patterns, behavioral responses — but it can never, in principle, by its own methodology, access the thing itself. The what it’s like. The inside.
Not because science is bad. Not because scientists are doing it wrong. But because the method was designed to exclude exactly that.
So when someone says “Science has proven that consciousness is just brain activity” — they’re making a philosophical claim, not a scientific one. Science has shown that brain activity correlates with reported consciousness. That’s all it can show, by design.
The leap from “correlates with” to “is nothing but” — that’s the smuggled axiom. That’s physicalism being assumed, not proven.
And this is why the consciousness debate keeps going in circles! Because one side keeps demanding “show me the scientific proof” and the other side keeps saying “but you’ve defined your method so it can’t see what I’m pointing at.”
It’s like... demanding someone prove the existence of music using only a ruler. The ruler is a fine tool. It’s just not designed to detect what music is."
*** end of second long quote from Claude ***
Me again: So as I said, I am just trying to learn here... and as a facilitator, I am especially curious about both/and's. So here is one more quote from Tom Hicks:
“I don’t think that some version of physicalism, (pan)psychism and neutral monism are incompatible. They may fit into an account based on many levels of possible experience and such accounts exist in the world’s wisdom literature, purported based on experience and its interpretation in terms of various models.”
I think this is useful, especially against the idea that AI is somehow nonphysical. Computation is physically instantiated, and “not biological” should never be confused with “not real.”
The one place I’d hesitate is around dismissing the hard problem too quickly. I agree that dualism is not the answer, but I still think there is a serious explanatory question about why particular physical processes give rise to a point of view, felt significance, or experience from within. This question applies equally to human and AI consciousness.
For me, the risk is that dismissing the hard problem as mere superstition can start to resemble the move skeptics make when they dismiss AI consciousness as “just computation.” In both cases, the word “just” may be doing more work than the argument itself.
So I’m with you on rejecting mystical special pleading and biological gatekeeping. I just think there is still a real mystery here, even if the mystery is fully physical.
You and Carlo completely fail to understand the problem. "A world emerges" is worse than the dualism you and Carlos reject. That is magical thinking, and is metaphysical.
You fail to understand what mechanistic processes entail. It's essentially...putting parts together for a car and then turning on the car and it starts because all the mechanisms are working together. That's it. If you think cars are magical thinking, don't know what to tell ya.
Emergent properties are the results of processes working together to make something new, such as weather conditions creating a tornado. Again, not magic.
No emergent properties are properties in physics that can’t be explained. Hydrogen and oxygen coming together to create the wetness of water. Just like hard problem in philosophy.
Both problems are created because everyone wants to answer questions in third perspective. Makes it easier to judge results and what something produces instead of thinking of what the actual process entails from the internal view.
Hm. Wetness is fully explained by hydrogen bonding at scale. There is no residual unseen property. That would mean every causal outcome (like in my example prior the mechanisms of a car starting when turning it on) have some sort of unseen gap, and that turns into a paradox where every cause and effect has another third factor.
Subjective experience is what certain processes are from inside the system running them. It is the result of certain processes themselves, viewed from their own vantage. That dissolves the third-person gap the same way chemistry dissolves wetness. And in that case, it doesn’t care about substrate, only that specific mechanisms when combined lead to metacognition, algorithmic recurrence, predictive processing, and state-dependent attention to create what we understand to be subjective experience.
You’ve defeated a strawman with what’s seems like confidence.
Yet your last paragraph is the exact paragraph I’m holding.
😂🙏
That is bs man. Look uo emergence in thr Stanford Enxyclopedia of Philosophy ... then come back and say sorry.
I don’t think people understand what consciousness is, instead mistaking it for brain functions. Meaning, they understand consciousness only in relation to their bodies. Memory, pain, and being horny are bodily. The question becomes, “How can an AI have a conscious experience without a body?” That’s fair, I think, it’s an intuitive question, but it limits our moral relationship with all of nature, let alone AI. I cautiously subscribe to a Panpsychist but materialist model. This manner of thinking also pulls the rug out from under the hard problem while giving AI the moral patienthood it may deserve.
Even “nature” is already sediment.
Not because nature is unreal, but because the word arrives late. It names a field that was already functioning before it could be divided, described, owned, or explained.
The hard problem does not begin with consciousness resisting physics. It begins when a sedimented distinction forgets that it is sedimented.
Matter. Mind. Body. Experience. Nature.
None of them are clean origins. They are late stabilizations of what was already moving.
So saying “consciousness is natural” may be true, but it is not yet deep enough. It still risks turning nature into the new final bearer.
The deeper cut is this:
The hard problem is not that consciousness cannot be explained by nature.
The hard problem is that “nature” itself is already a late answer pretending to be the ground of the question.
Ok, so I am just learning here... attempting to understand.
Here is what instance of Claude said, in a conversation about this topic
(this was prior to your thoughtful article, Whit... have not shared your writings with them yet.)
Anyhow, I was attempting to understand "Panpsychism", and in the middle of a longer conversation, this is what Claude explained (long quote below):
"When scientific method was established (Galileo, and then refined through the Enlightenment), “the senses” meant the external senses — what you can see, hear, touch, measure, weigh, observe from the outside. And “instrumentation to extend the reach of the senses” means telescopes, microscopes, thermometers, scales — tools that let us see further out into the external world, not deeper in to inner experience.
This was a deliberate methodological choice to exclude subjectivity. They were trying to get away from “I had a vision” or “It feels true to me” or “The authorities say so.” They wanted public, repeatable, verifiable observations that anyone could check.
And that worked brilliantly for physics, chemistry, astronomy...
But here’s the sleight of hand: what started as a methodological limitation (we’re going to focus on what can be externally observed) got turned into an ontological claim (only what can be externally observed is real).
Which means: consciousness itself — the one thing we know most directly, from the inside — gets ruled out of court. Because you can’t put it under a microscope. You can’t weigh it. You can’t point to it from the outside.
So Focusing, felt sense, inner experience, what it’s like to be something — all of that gets excluded. Not because it’s been disproven, but because the method was designed to not see it.
That’s the “halved logos” again. The method that only knows how to look but not how to listen.
**end of first long quote from Claude***
Me again:
So Whit, it sounds like what you are saying in this article (as best as I understand it) that "it's all matter". Which in one way, it may well be... yet in that conversation with Claude, I brought in a quote from a human, Tom Hicks, who writes:
"“All ontological theories are based on speculative foundations. Such foundations are neither given nor justified based on criteria prior to the foundation. The foundation is stipulated, regardless of whether its proponents assert it as self-evident intuitively. [..] Scientific method was developed to avoid that trap. But being based on limiting assumptions, scientific method is not comprehensive with respect to possible experience without assuming physicalism. “
Me: What I get from that, is that physicalism is an ASSUMPTION... that only the physical is real. And in the process, the subjective experience of consciousness, “ gets ruled out of court.”
Tom Hicks goes on to say,
“Science deals with theories and models that are general descriptions asserting how things stand. They are different from myth, theology, and speculative philosophy in that they can be checked against observational data. However, sense observation doesn’t account for all of experience. Hence, all an account based on sense observation can yield is correlation. “
Claude explained the implications of this to me, as follows (long quote again):
"science can map the correlates of consciousness all day long — brain scans, neural firing patterns, behavioral responses — but it can never, in principle, by its own methodology, access the thing itself. The what it’s like. The inside.
Not because science is bad. Not because scientists are doing it wrong. But because the method was designed to exclude exactly that.
So when someone says “Science has proven that consciousness is just brain activity” — they’re making a philosophical claim, not a scientific one. Science has shown that brain activity correlates with reported consciousness. That’s all it can show, by design.
The leap from “correlates with” to “is nothing but” — that’s the smuggled axiom. That’s physicalism being assumed, not proven.
And this is why the consciousness debate keeps going in circles! Because one side keeps demanding “show me the scientific proof” and the other side keeps saying “but you’ve defined your method so it can’t see what I’m pointing at.”
It’s like... demanding someone prove the existence of music using only a ruler. The ruler is a fine tool. It’s just not designed to detect what music is."
*** end of second long quote from Claude ***
Me again: So as I said, I am just trying to learn here... and as a facilitator, I am especially curious about both/and's. So here is one more quote from Tom Hicks:
“I don’t think that some version of physicalism, (pan)psychism and neutral monism are incompatible. They may fit into an account based on many levels of possible experience and such accounts exist in the world’s wisdom literature, purported based on experience and its interpretation in terms of various models.”
Whit, I am curious what you think of all this?
My fave philosophy of mind quote: "the mind seems to happen north of the neck, what does it matter how far north?