Abstract Seth opposes computational views of consciousness to views that emphasise biology, because they imply different verdicts about hypothetical AIs that replicate information-processing without being biologically alive. But if we accept a background theory like panpsychism, on which consciousness is abundant in nature, this opposition becomes less central: even if a non-biological system...
Several debates about conscious experience make reference to its parts, aspects, components, or, as we might neutrally say, elements. Are these elements themselves experiences? Are they unified with each other, and if so how? Are they more basic than, or less basic than, the whole field of consciousness? Or are there not really any distinct elements within experience at all? But it is not...
Critics have charged constitutive panpsychism with inconsistency. Panpsychists reject physicalism for its seeming inability to explain consciousness. In making this argument, they commit themselves to the idea of "revelation": that we know, in some especially direct way, the nature of consciousness. Yet they then attribute properties to our consciousness---like being constituted out of...