This is just unfortunate. It's a consequence of scientists themselves not understanding how life emerges out of physics. Absent this understanding, one can easily fall into this kind of worthless extrapolation.
I understand the appeal of 'one force that binds the universe together'. I further understand the first-person perspective that is inextricable in physics. But when we use the term consciousness, we imply a speckle of agency and hence the presence of choice.
The laws of physics are not broken even if biological creatures have agency. Agency in the sense that select behaviors in response to sensing their environments.
The problem with panpsychism is that it stretches the definition of consciousness so thinly that it is unrecognizable. It's a degenerate form of consciousness that has no usefulness in how we frame our reality.
Its only useful purpose is to give us the "warm and fuzzies." But from the physics perspective, it does not add any new physics nor does it lead to any novel interpretations. It's meta-physics that has no bearing on the actual physics of reality.
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Peter Godfrey-Smith in his book Other Minds speculates that consciousness exists in a continuum from single-cell animals all the way to complex multicellular creatures such as humans.
Hidden in the idea of a continuum of capability is an assumption of every agent has the same innate capability but is only restricted by degree.
When we think of artificial neural networks, there is what is known as the scaling hypothesis, which conjectures that general intelligence is achievable by even larger networks. arxiv.org/abs/2001.08361
Why must conscious biological creatures be made of predominantly unconscious stuff? Is not the answer to this within the realm of our daily experience?
The answer is simple. To avoid unnecessary and expensive bureaucracy. Imagine a brain where everything is micromanaged from a centralized command and control center. It would be crushed by the complexity of the task.
The brain is composed of a multitude of unconscious processes. Each process disseminating indications of inconsistencies in its predictions to other processes. The purpose of this information distribution is to ensure the homeostasis of the whole brain.
It's incorrect to treat either emotions or consciousness like an axiom in the formulation of general intelligence.
I agree that emotions are a parameter in cognition. I agree with @PLinz But this parameter is also regulated by cognition. How we perceive the world is regulated by our cognition and emotions are an emergent response to our perception. An axiom is a boundary condition.
Emotions are affected by our perception and thus it's not a boundary condition but rather is a constraint that morphs with our subsequent interactions with our world and our minds.
In the quest for customers, innovative businesses have explored different ways to give away things for free and seeking their revenue in unexpected ways. So there was always this race to the bottom and the winners are those able to scale economically.
We see this game being played by countries in the taxes on companies that they are willing to ignore. We see this also in the US where states with different taxation laws. This is of course all a race to the bottom by its participants.
In today's economy, you don't really have captive citizens or captive corporations. The digital economy has allowed them to operate wherever they please to do. This mobility gives them bargaining power.
Perhaps it was a brilliant idea that WHO gave a different name for a variant of the covid virus. Humans are tuned to know that different names imply different behavior. Just like hurricanes have different names. Each kind requires different preparations.
It is just fascinating how unaware public institutions are of how to express public safety messages in a manner that intuitively encapsulates the concern. The virus is problematic because it does not remain the same.
But too many overlook this reality and believe that whatever worked in the past will work today. This fallacy is more obvious when you give it another name (i.e. Delta). How you prepare for a hurricane is different because you is different by virtue of an assignment of a name.
OMG! This is a very sad clip for me. I was inspired by Carl Sagan's Cosmos when I was growing up. I just realized that decades of us have grown up without the same inspiration. They instead were inspired by an anti-science agenda.
If Carl Sagan is so critically important to the survival of civilization then why is it that we have so few Carl Sagans?
Because present civilization selects out the Carl Sagans of this world. Sagan was denied tenure at Harvard due to (1) his interests were too broad across many areas (2) his well-publicized scientific advocacy was perceived as borrowing the ideas of others. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan