Does anyone really claim that every recurrent net is conscious? It seems so implausible.
I think IIT supporters would claim this. I don’t think most theories or their supporters claim to be panpsychist, but I think if you look at their physical requirements abstractly, they are panpsychist. Actually, Lamme, who came up with Recurrent Processing Theory, claims that it, IIT and GNWT endorse panpsychism here1, and it seems that he really did intend for two neurons to be enough for recurrent processing:
Current models of consciousness all suffer from the same problem: at their core, they are fairly simple, too simple maybe. The distinction between feedforward and recurrent processing already exists between two reciprocally connected neurons. Add a third and we can distinguish between ‘local’ and ‘global’ recurrent processing. From a functional perspective, processes like integration, feature binding, global access, attention, report, working memory, metacognition and many others can be modelled with a limited set of mechanisms (or lines of Matlab code). More importantly, it is getting increasingly clear that versions of these functions exist throughout the animal kingdom, and maybe even in plants.
1. In a more limited form applying to basically all animals and possibly plants, too, but I think his view of what should count as a network or processing might be too narrow, e.g. why shouldn’t an electron and its position count as a neuron and its firing?
I think IIT supporters would claim this. I don’t think most theories or their supporters claim to be panpsychist, but I think if you look at their physical requirements abstractly, they are panpsychist. Actually, Lamme, who came up with Recurrent Processing Theory, claims that it, IIT and GNWT endorse panpsychism here1, and it seems that he really did intend for two neurons to be enough for recurrent processing:
1. In a more limited form applying to basically all animals and possibly plants, too, but I think his view of what should count as a network or processing might be too narrow, e.g. why shouldn’t an electron and its position count as a neuron and its firing?