Thank you! Glad I got someone else to crawl out of the woodwork, welcome to the EA forum :). (I’m also more of a lurker.)
The paper you linked is indeed fantastic, I think it might be my favourite piece of writing ever. I read it after I wrote this hence why I didn’t talk about it. There are two other things I would point towards w.r.t to the topic of panpsychism: - The Computational Boundary of the Self (another great one from Levin) - If Materialism is True, the United States is Probably Conscious (by a fella called Schwitzgebel)
And w.r.t what you are saying about being surrounded by diverse beings—I think thinking about cyborgs and engineered entities is a great way to prepare the ground for this kind of moral shake-up, but the more I look into this the more I think that we are already surrounded by weird and wonderful beings—distributed group entities at all levels, ecology, economy, politics, sociology.
I am still thinking and reading about these topics a lot, and in the next months I’ll have some free time to maybe do some more writing about it.
In a way I see why animal welfarists are avoiding panpsychism at the moment—the absolute hellscape of welfare that is the meat industry definitely feels more pressing than, like, figuring out how to measure the welfare of the USA or the brazilian rainforest or so. Though maybe in the long run, seeing these entities as agents with hedonic valency will be a good and useful way of talking about their health and the way they act in the world. What is the impact of tictok on the mental health of the entity that is the USA? Maybe this is actually a very good and important framing, and useful?
Thank you! Glad I got someone else to crawl out of the woodwork, welcome to the EA forum :). (I’m also more of a lurker.)
The paper you linked is indeed fantastic, I think it might be my favourite piece of writing ever. I read it after I wrote this hence why I didn’t talk about it. There are two other things I would point towards w.r.t to the topic of panpsychism:
- The Computational Boundary of the Self (another great one from Levin)
- If Materialism is True, the United States is Probably Conscious (by a fella called Schwitzgebel)
And w.r.t what you are saying about being surrounded by diverse beings—I think thinking about cyborgs and engineered entities is a great way to prepare the ground for this kind of moral shake-up, but the more I look into this the more I think that we are already surrounded by weird and wonderful beings—distributed group entities at all levels, ecology, economy, politics, sociology.
I am still thinking and reading about these topics a lot, and in the next months I’ll have some free time to maybe do some more writing about it.
In a way I see why animal welfarists are avoiding panpsychism at the moment—the absolute hellscape of welfare that is the meat industry definitely feels more pressing than, like, figuring out how to measure the welfare of the USA or the brazilian rainforest or so. Though maybe in the long run, seeing these entities as agents with hedonic valency will be a good and useful way of talking about their health and the way they act in the world. What is the impact of tictok on the mental health of the entity that is the USA? Maybe this is actually a very good and important framing, and useful?
Lets see!