You might still think there needs to be some level of complexity within your system to approach a level of valenced conscious experience anything like that which you and I are familiar. Even if there’s no arbitrary “complexity cut-off”, for “processes that matter morally” do we care about elemental systems that might have, quantitatively, a tiny, tiny fraction of the conscious experience of humans and other living beings?
I think we couldn’t justify not assigning them some value with such an approach, even if it’s so little we can ignore it (although it could add up).
To be a bit more concrete about it (and I suspect you agree with me on this point): when it comes to thinking about which animals have valenced conscious experience and thus matter morally, I don’t think panpsychism has much to add—do you? To the extent that GWT, HOT, or IIT ends up being confirmed through observation, we can then proceed to work out how much of each of those experiences each species of animal has, without worrying how widely that extends out to non-living matter.
I agree, and I think this could be a good approach.
My reading leading up to this post and the post itself were prompted by what seemed to be unjustifiable confidence in almost all nonhuman animals not being conscious. Maybe a more charitable interpretation or a steelman of these positions is just that almost all nonhumans animals have only extremely low levels of consciousness compared to humans (although I’d disagree with this).
I think we couldn’t justify not assigning them some value with such an approach, even if it’s so little we can ignore it (although it could add up).
I agree, and I think this could be a good approach.
My reading leading up to this post and the post itself were prompted by what seemed to be unjustifiable confidence in almost all nonhuman animals not being conscious. Maybe a more charitable interpretation or a steelman of these positions is just that almost all nonhumans animals have only extremely low levels of consciousness compared to humans (although I’d disagree with this).
It’s worth checking out this very much ongoing twitter thread with Lamme about related issues.
https://mobile.twitter.com/VictorLamme/status/1258855709623693325