Panpsychism Makes a Comeback; physicist denies (General)

by David Turell , Friday, January 04, 2019, 00:02 (1938 days ago) @ David Turell

Sabine Hossenfelder says no way at the particle level:

http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/01/electrons-dont-think.html

"Now, look, I know that physicists have a reputation of being narrow-minded. But the reason we have this reputation is that we tried the crazy shit long ago and just found it doesn’t work. You call it “narrow-minded,” we call it “science.” We have moved on. Can elementary particles be conscious? No, they can’t. It’s in conflict with evidence. Here’s why.

***

"Now, if you want a particle to be conscious, your minimum expectation should be that the particle can change. It’s hard to have an inner life with only one thought. But if electrons could have thoughts, we’d long have seen this in particle collisions because it would change the number of particles produced in collisions.

"In other words, electrons aren’t conscious, and neither are any other particles. It’s incompatible with data.

"As I explain in my book, there are ways to modify the standard model that do not run into conflict with experiment. One of them is to make new particles so massive that so far we have not managed to produce them in particle collisions, but this doesn’t help you here. Another way is to make them interact so weakly that we haven’t been able to detect them. This too doesn’t help here. The third way is to assume that the existing particles are composed of more fundamental constituents, that are, however, so strongly bound together that we have not yet been able to tear them apart.

"With the third option it is indeed possible to add internal states to elementary particles. But if your goal is to give consciousness to those particles so that we can inherit it from them, strongly bound composites do not help you. They do not help you exactly because you have hidden this consciousness so that it needs a lot of energy to access. This then means, of course, that you cannot use it at lower energies, like the ones typical for soft and wet thinking apparatuses like human brains.

"Summary: If a philosopher starts speaking about elementary particles, run."

Comment: Her blog is lots of fun. She always tells it like it is. I think God's consciousness runs the universe. Panpsychism simply steals from that idea.