Dennettian Creature

...for perspective, especially when the current torrent of misinformation clouds our ability to think.

...dangerous. Social media comment threads spin out of control on this story (including with the analysis I just re-posted). Human brains and society are not equipped to process information in this way. My attempt to bring up nature and evolution feels awkward, but I always check in with nature...

...a fact of life. The problem (if I can finally make a point !) is that the flow of information in a healthy human society must pass through established (naturally-evolved) systems if it is to be useful. Trumpist big-tech oligarchs abuse this technology to manipulate public opinion. This is...

...on Earth, information emerged slowly at first, tied closely with the matter from which it emerged, and then, with human culture, taking flight and moving faster than ever. But Nature does not want information to spread so quickly as to wrap around the Earth within seconds. Hysteresis is...

...advantage of. For a healthy human society, what is the best rate of the flow of information? Faster is often good, but in order to be useful, information needs to pass through many physical nodes, including people, verification systems, social absorption, etc. In the evolution of life...

...infected by parasitic misinformation, triggering emotional responses. A healthy news delivery system - out of necessity - must move more slowly in order to collect facts and craft for mass consumption. The internet has enabled near-instant information, which profit-hungry corporate media take...

This is revealing on many levels. Let's take it all the way from late-breaking news to millions of years of evolution. @ddiamond makes an important point: inaccurate information spreads quickly in the social media-fueled news cycle. While this particular event is not consequential, it is easily...

...possible because the human model of the world includes the self and its social manifestation: theory-of-mind.

Yes. Making more sense. The recursive nature of consciousness is a useful angle. My take: all living things need some internal model of the world to survive. Brainy animals have complex models, and humans have uniquely recursive models which co-evolved with language. Unbounded self-reflection is...

I agree. I like the conclusion that "things don't matter because we feel them. We feel them because they matter." But the rest of the sentence is a little opaque. Could you restate in a different way?

...and messy human reality, which relies on nature in the aggregate, not on atoms.

...physics, is futile. We are a product of evolution, and the way we think, understand, communicate, and reason, is itself an emergent property. Physics will continue on its productive path. The science of consciousness should embrace strong emergence, and engage in the complexity of our evolved...

...brand of consciousness that our species possesses. Science must not eradicate spiritual life. It can justify and explain it, but we all need to pray sometimes, and we all need to appreciate the web of life. Scientific reductionism - the attempt to explain everything at the level of fundamental...

...growing evidence of consciousness as an emergent property of living systems. The evolution of human language and the brains that propagate that language has created inner-simulations of how the world works, and how all these selves interact (human and otherwise) -- and this is the special...

...ecosystems, to more I feel this life-force. I may even call myself a biological panpsychist, not just feeling the integrated energy but believing it as scientifically valid. So far there is no scientific evidence that the basis for consciousness is to be found at the atomic level. But there is...

...level. But this is unnecessary in my opinion. Hardcore panpsychists could make one change: to limit the phenomenon to biological life and not try to push it lower than molecules. The more I learn about the evolution of agency in all living systems, the vast interconnected signaling in complex...

...in human culture for so long. Panpsychism is not so much a calculated logical theory as much as a deep feeling or intuition, which some try to justify with scientific explanations that often just end up as pseudoscience - especially when panpsychists try to place subjectivity at the subatomic...

tendency to see and feel a spiritual dimension to the living world, manifested as God or as a universal life-force...or as a pervasive field of consciousness - panpsychism. Dennett was a thoughtful atheist and urged people to understand religion - to explore the reasons it has been so pervasive...

...reality). The reason is what Dennett calls "Cartesian gravity". Dualism is natural because it evolved in human language/brains/society for practical reasons - as a mental structure that recognizes selves with free will. It is an artifact of human theory-of-mind. There is also a natural...

As I awkwardly evolve personally in my rhetoric to criticize #panpsychism, I find myself forgiving panpsychists in the way an illusionist might forgive one who falls for Cartesian dualism (the often-unstated and unexamined belief that mind/consciousness occupies a different realm than physical...

I agree that these pandynamic forces are beyond the realm of physics and that they are a property of evolved living systems. When I hear a panpsychist claiming that subjectivity arises at the subatomic level, I have to roll my third eye.

...alternative. But panpsychism is not scientifically valid. It is useful and meaningful as a spiritual perspective for many people, but it is not supported by any scientific evidence.

...attractive to intuition but scientifically invalid. It will emerge often and it might be a sign of a lack of collective agreement on higher meanings. Many thoughtful people are attracted to it because they are repelled by the notion of an all-powerful God in the sky: it provides a nice...

@anjiolina - I prefer to think of panpsychism as a natural tendency that emerges at different times in history and in different ways. It's origins are not necessarily from modern thinkers influencing each other but rather an ancient spiritual belief system, like Cartesian dualism, which is...

...which can be both dangerous to mental health or intellectually liberating.

...am sometimes harshly-critical (and sometimes privately insecure). Partitioning one's life into anonymous personae is normal in some ways - we all do it to a certain extent when we shift between our roles in life. The virtuality of the internet allows construction of multiple personalities...

...while protecting our core identities and allowing them to thrive without all the thrashing. One downside is that I (this anonymous "I") may not be fully trusted (what am I hiding?) Another drawback is that I am tempted at times to the anti-social behavior that comes with anonymity, and I...

...The internet and social media has created a rather unnatural environment for us poor humans. Our intellectual and social lives are subject to fragmentation and manipulation and dissolution. We can own this space by choosing ways to partition ourselves into personas that we can wear at will...

...be anonymous, mine are as follows: (1) it permits me to focus on ideas rather than identity, which I find oddly liberating. (2) I've been so transformed by Dennett's philosophy that I want to spread the gospel while also being challenged by thoughtful people who hold different views. (3)...

You are forgiven! I'm glad you brought this up, because I've been thinking more about what originally compelled me to create an anonymous account on BlueSky (as an experiment which seems to be working for me, through there are some drawbacks). Out of the various reasons people choose to...