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[Pattern-chaser]

Panpsychism would give equal status to a atom of hydrogen and the brain of Einstein. Where's the merit in it?

That is not panpsychism as I've heard it described. That's just the flakiest end of the new age movement. Read my aura, Dora, it's real angora. By the same token, most Christians do not believe in the Big Man in the Sky, but have more subtle beliefs.

Yes, I think Sculptor1 is offering the Daily Mail straw man version of panpsychism. Perhaps it shakes his own beliefs so much he becomes frightened enough to misrepresent it? I don't know.

Panpsychism is simply the view that all matter has consciousness, in some way/sense. This does not mean that panpsychism equates all conscious matter, only that it recognises consciousness in everything. But this is obvious.

I find straw men attacks particularly offensive. I always have done. To wrongly accuse someone or something irritates me intensely. And to craft a lie to fabricate the wrongful accusation is the worst. Grrr.

Bow-tie Daddy don'tcha you blow your top. Everything's under control.

[Sculptor1]

Panpsychism would give equal status to a atom of hydrogen and the brain of Einstein. Where's the merit in it?

That is not panpsychism as I've heard it described. That's just the flakiest end of the new age movement. Read my aura, Dora, it's real angora. By the same token, most Christians do not believe in the Big Man in the Sky, but have more subtle beliefs.

Yes, I think Sculptor1 is offering the Daily Mail straw man version of panpsychism. Perhaps it shakes his own beliefs so much he becomes frightened enough to misrepresent it? I don't know.

Rubbish.

Panpsychism is simply the view that all matter has consciousness, in some way/sense.

WHich is rubbish.

This does not mean that panpsychism equates all conscious matter, only that it recognises consciousness in everything. But this is obvious.

If this sentence parsed correctly it would probably still be wrong.

I find straw men attacks particularly offensive. I always have done. To wrongly accuse someone or something irritates me intensely. And to craft a lie to fabricate the wrongful accusation is the worst.

But you like ad hominems.

[Pattern-chaser]

But you like ad hominems.

No, I like courtesy. And I really don't like lies or dishonesty, of which straw man attacks are the worst.

[Pattern-chaser]

This does not mean that panpsychism equates all conscious matter, only that it recognises consciousness in everything.

If this sentence parsed correctly it would probably still be wrong.

equate verb
\ i-ˈkwāt
, ˈē-ˌkwāt \
equated; equating

Definition of equate

transitive verb
1a : to make equal : equalize
b : to make such an allowance or correction in as will reduce to a common standard or obtain a correct result
2 : to treat, represent, or regard as equal, equivalent, or comparable

// equates disagreement with disloyalty

As far as I can see, it parses OK. Is your comment serious, or just a hidden ad hominem?

[Consul]

Correct. Plant consciousness, if there is such a thing, is an unknown area for all of us. I am responding to the apparent certainty of some posters. Once we get past that, we could perhaps begin to speculate on what plant consciousness might be, and how it might look to us. But first I think we must ditch our preconceptions; it is surely obvious to all of us that human and plant consciousness must differ considerably, and lessons learned from one probably can't be applied to the other.

If you say that plants are or may be conscious, you'd better know what it means to say so.

Generally, differences between consciousnesses are differences in experiential content (kinds of experiences), differences in the spatiotemporal order or structure of the experiential content, differences in the level of consciousness (degrees of wakefulness, brightness of consciousness), or differences in cognitive (introspective/reflective) awareness of the experiential content.

[Consul]

If you say that plants are or may be conscious, you'd better know what it means to say so.

There's a relevant distinction between transitive consciousness (consciousness of something) and intransitive consciousness (as in "The patient is conscious/regained consciousness"). The former can be equated with perception; so if "Plants are conscious" means "Plants are transitively conscious" = "Plants perceive things", then this doesn't mean the same as "Plants are phenomenally conscious". For there is such a thing as phenomenally nonconscious transitive consciousness (perception). So if plants are transitively conscious in the sense of being capable of perception (information-detection), it doesn't follow that they are also phenomenally conscious in the sense that their perceptions involve subjective sensations (sense-impressions).

It should be clear that when I said that plants aren't conscious/lack consciousness, I meant to say that they aren't phenomenally conscious/lack phenomenal consciousness (= subjective sentience/experience).

[Pattern-chaser]

Correct. Plant consciousness, if there is such a thing, is an unknown area for all of us. I am responding to the apparent certainty of some posters. Once we get past that, we could perhaps begin to speculate on what plant consciousness might be, and how it might look to us. But first I think we must ditch our preconceptions; it is surely obvious to all of us that human and plant consciousness must differ considerably, and lessons learned from one probably can't be applied to the other.

If you say that plants are or may be conscious, you'd better know what it means to say so.

I don't say that, but I wonder if plants could be conscious, and if so, what such a consciousness might look like from my human point of view.

We all know - in an everyday and general sense - what "conscious" and "consciousness" mean. Equally, when we try to make our understanding a bit more formal and rigorous, we run into problems. A precise definition is so difficult that I have never seen one, although I have seen many attempts in that direction.

This discussion is speculative, and is necessarily vague at this point, where our understanding is only starting to take shape.

Generally, differences between consciousnesses are...

If you already know so much about consciousness, in such a precise and detailed form, why don't you just give us your understanding, and save us from our speculative musings?

Tomas Nagel talked to us about bats. This topic takes us even farther from our understanding of what it is like to be human. Bats and humans are more or less the same thing, compared with what it's like to be a plant. That's speculation, of course, as it must be.

If we are unable to speculate, and indulge in some mental flexibility, how will we ever reach something that we could examine more critically? You seem to want (need?) to jump straight into a precise scientific understanding, and that seems hugely premature to me, when we're talking about the possibility of something most of us have never even considered before.

[Sculptor1]

But you like ad hominems.

No, I like courtesy. And I really don't like lies or dishonesty, of which straw man attacks are the worst.

Then you should love my statement that any atom has the same consious value as any other one, whether it be in einsteins brain or s lump of horse ****.
My comment is both honest and accurate.

[Sculptor1]

This does not mean that panpsychism equates all conscious matter, only that it recognises consciousness in everything.

If this sentence parsed correctly it would probably still be wrong.

equate verb
\ i-ˈkwāt
, ˈē-ˌkwāt \
equated; equating

Definition of equate

transitive verb
1a : to make equal : equalize
b : to make such an allowance or correction in as will reduce to a common standard or obtain a correct result
2 : to treat, represent, or regard as equal, equivalent, or comparable

// equates disagreement with disloyalty

As far as I can see, it parses OK. Is your comment serious, or just a hidden ad hominem?

Equates to?
You might want to be more precise about what you mean by "this" and "it" in the sentence too.

[Pattern-chaser]

...my statement that any atom has the same consious value as any other one, whether it be in einsteins brain or s lump of horse ****.

Is that really what you said?

Panpsychism would give equal status to a atom of hydrogen and the brain of Einstein.

Oh no, you said what I remembered you to say. You compared the "status" of a single atom with that of an entire human brain. You didn't compare one atom with another. The things you did choose to compare cannot be compared meaningfully anyway, any more than an apple can be compared to a black hole.

Your comment is still a straw man attack on panpsychism, which does not claim what you say it claims.

[Sculptor1]

...my statement that any atom has the same consious value as any other one, whether it be in einsteins brain or s lump of horse ****.

Is that really what you said?

Panpsychism would give equal status to a atom of hydrogen and the brain of Einstein.

Oh no, you said what I remembered you to say. You compared the "status" of a single atom with that of an entire human brain. You didn't compare one atom with another. The things you did choose to compare cannot be compared meaningfully anyway, any more than an apple can be compared to a black hole.

Your comment is still a straw man attack on panpsychism, which does not claim what you say it claims.

You do not know what Pan means, obviously.
How doe you think panpsychism is supposed to work?

[Consul]

You do not know what Pan means, obviously.
How doe you think panpsychism is supposed to work?

Many contemporary panpsychists have stopped taking "pan-" literally. For example:

"Panpsychism, taken literally, is the doctrine that everything has a mind. In practice, people who call themselves panpsychists are not committed to as strong a doctrine. They are not committed to the thesis that the number two has a mind, or that the Eiffel tower has a mind, or that the city of Canberra has a mind, even if they believe in the existence of numbers, towers, and cities.
Instead, we can understand panpsychism as the thesis that some fundamental physical entities have mental states. For example, if quarks or photons have mental states, that suffices for panpsychism to be true, even if rocks and cities do not have mental states. Perhaps it would not suffice for just one photon to have mental states. The line here is blurry, but we can read the definition as requiring that all members of some fundamental physical types (all photons, for example) have mental states."

(Chalmers, David J. "Panpsychism and Panprotopsychism." In Panpsychism: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Godehard Brüntrup and Ludwig Jaskolla, 19-47. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. p. 19)

So the literal "all-ism" of panpsychism has become a "some-ism"; but "panpsychism" has thereby become a misnomer, strictly speaking. If panpsychism is reduced to "the thesis that some fundamental physical entities have mental states", then we'd better have and use an alternative, more suitable label for that thesis—given that "pan-" just doesn't mean "some" and doesn't connote fundamentality either.

Galen Strawson has suggested "micropsychism", but I'm not quite happy with this label either. How about "urpsychism" ("Urpsychismus" in German), with the (etymologically German) prefix "ur-" meaning "primitive" or "original" ("present or existing from the beginning, first or earliest")? – Urpsychism is the thesis that there have always been fundamental physical entities with mental/experiential states.

"By 'micropsychism' I mean the view that starts out from the standard assumption that there is an irreducible plurality of fundamental physical entities, and that they're very small. It agrees with panpsychism in endorsing the view that experientiality must be among the fundamental properties of reality, but disagrees that all fundamental entities must be of such a nature that they are individually intrinsically experience-involving. Micropsychism holds merely that at least some of them must have this property."

(Strawson, Galen. Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics. Rev. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. xxii)

[Pattern-chaser]

Panpsychism would give equal status to a atom of hydrogen and the brain of Einstein.

You do not know what Pan means, obviously.
How doe you think panpsychism is supposed to work?

Panpsychism says that all matter is conscious. It does not say that all matter is therefore of "equal status". Straw man attack.

[Consul]

QUOTE>
"Then there is the question of the need for a brain. We normally suppose that one of these is pretty useful when it comes to having a mind, indeed a sine qua non (even if it’s made of silicon); we suppose that, at a minimum, a physical object has to exhibit the right degree of complexity before it can make a mind. But the panpsychist is having none of it: you get to have a mind well before even organic cells come on the market, before molecules indeed. Actually, you get mentality—experience—at the point of the Big Bang, fifteen billion years before brains are minted. So brains are a kind of contingency, a kind of pointless luxury when it comes to possessing mental states. It becomes puzzling why we have them at all, and why they are so big and fragile; atoms don’t need them, so why do we? And this puzzle only becomes more severe when we remind ourselves that the panpsychist has to believe in full-throttle pre-cerebral mentality—genuine experiences of red and pangs of hunger and spasms of lust. As Eddington puts it, the mental world that we are acquainted with in introspection is a window onto the world of the physical universe, and the two are qualitatively alike: introspection tells us what matter is like from the inside, whether it is in our brain or not. But then the brain isn’t necessary for the kind of experiential property it reveals to us; it is only necessary for the revealing to occur. What is revealed by introspection is spread over the entire physical universe. In fact, it would not be stretching a point to say that all bits of matter—from strings, to quarks, to atoms, to molecules, to cells, to organs, to animals—are themselves brains. There can be brains without brains! But if so, why bother with brains?"

(McGinn, Colin. "Hard Questions: Comments on Galen Strawson." Journal of Consciousness Studies 13, no. 10/11 (2006): 90–99. pp. 96-7)

"If all matter has full-blown thoughts and feelings, why do organisms need nervous systems to think and feel? Why not just install a simple particle in my head and hook it up to my body? Surely the complexity and form of the brain is necessary to possessing a mind in the full sense. But that is hard to square with the idea that even rocks have thoughts and feelings just like you and me."

(McGinn, Colin. The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World. New York: Basic Books, 1999. p. 97)
<QUOTE

[psyreporter]

I'm having a real problem deciding what to eat. I was going to have a salad, I've got lots of nice fresh tomatoes, cucumber, radishes, olives and so on, but I'm now worried that they may all be conscious. I mean, the tomatoes aren't attached to the mother plant any more, but maybe it's just like they've gone off to uni, you know?

So I'm thinking I'll leave the salad veg in peace, and eat some vegetables out of a tin - or, as I'm now thinking of it, a little metal coffin. Because even if they were conscious when they were put in there, they've been in there for long time, so they're probably dead by now, don't you think? But still, I'm not sure. Maybe they're just asleep.......

I've got some fresh mushrooms. Are fungi safe to eat? Or are fungi just very slow plants?

I did think of having a slice of bread, but then I thought of all those wheat plants brutally cut down and having their ears cut off, and I couldn't face it.

Earlier today I caught my dog eating soil from one of the tubs in the garden. I told him off, because for all I know, soil may be conscious.

I'm getting really hungry. Can anyone help?

It is an interesting question and I understand the seriousness of the issue, since some people could actually decide not to eat when they have the idea that plants are sentient and are hurt in the process of being eaten.

Bulimia is a serious condition. More than 10,000 people die each year by stopping eating.

(2021) Eating Disorders Are on the Rise
https://nutrition.org/eating-disorders-are-on-the-rise/

Plants intentionally provide food to animals with fruits and nuts being clear evidence. From that perspective, it may be most ethical to accept what is 'given' and to make optimal use of it to prevent it going to waste.

When a mother provides milk to a baby, it would be most ethical for the baby to accept it and to grow into a healthy and prosperous human being.

What is given by plants may be considered 'given by Mother Nature' and it is most ethical to accept it and to make optimal use of it.

What Nature could want from humans is to serve life optimally, and to do so, the human would need to evolve into a 'moral being' which can be achieved with philosophy (reason beyond value).

Awareness that a plant is a meaningful creature may be sufficient to address plant morality. Plants have a different strategy for successful evolution than animals. They may not actually be hurt when destroyed or eaten, although their physiological responses are still to be considered meaningful and thus worthy of consideration.

If plants are to posses consciousness, it may be found in their root system deep under the ground, since that is where 'neuron' like cells and neurotransmitters have been found, however, some plants may not mind when that part is eaten with carrots being an example.

The advocacy by philosophy professor Michael Marder that plants should be eaten with respect may be sufficient to address plant morality. It would essentially be a simple 'thank you' to the plant, and care for its long term future, so that the plant achieves a potential to share in a higher purpose and to become 'happy'.

Philosopher: Plants are sentient beings that should be eaten with respect
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/unth ... -1.1965980

The following books may provide answers if you are seriously wondering how it would be most ethical to eat plants:

Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/167 ... t-thinking

The Philosopher's Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/223 ... er-s-plant

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My advise: accept what is given and dedicate to making best use!