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[psyreporter]

As for talk of this sort of panpsychism and that sort of pan vitalism i have this to say:
There is fudge and then there is synthetic fudge sauce. You can also get re-constituted fudge based protein flavoured shake. Still all tastes like fudge. And BTW, none of these confections are moral agents.

My concern is that with eating, it may not merely involve transferring empirically comprehensible properties but also for a large part 'meaning'. When meaning would be erroneously neglected, it may cause longer term issues for prosperity.

Synthetic food could be seen as a form of incest. It would be like feeding through the anus (an empirical retro-perspective as source for food).

The real world is more complex than a dinner, and the human can overcome a lot, at least for a few hundred years. At question is simply what is best for long term prosperity (1,000 or 10,000 years, with the intent to 'start today in the best way' to achieve maximum advantage), and from that perspective I believe that synthetic biology / GMO could be disastrous for human evolution.

No one is ever going to give a mosquito moral status for any reason, but there is every reason to assess a mosquito's ability in the consciousness department as being greater than all plants of any kind.
If consciousness is the key to morality then plants do not have it.

I would not agree with this. While it is most wise to remove mosquito's from the human environment, so to enable humans to prosper, similar to that humans have driven tigers away from cities, that does not imply that mosquitoes are not to receive moral consideration.

The bizarre and ecologically important hidden lives of mosquitoes
Mosquitoes have many functions in the ecosystem that are overlooked. Indiscriminate mass elimination of mosquitoes would impact everything from pollination to biomass transfer to food webs.
https://theconversation.com/the-bizarre ... oes-127599

Mosquitoes grow in swamps and are critical to the perpetuation of diverse microbes. Some (such as the agents of malaria, filariasis, and arboviruses as dengue) infect and burden human beings but there are also many good microbes.

6 great things microbes do for us
https://blog.ted.com/6-great-things-microbes-do-for-us/

Microbes outnumber human cells in individual humans. There are 10 times as many microbial cells in the human body as there are human cells. Without the microbes, the human could not live.

With regard to consciousness. When plants have conscious experience and when the neurons in their root system provide the basis for that, then, some big trees may have more neurons than a human brain, providing potential for an experience that is of a much higher level than that of a mosquito.

A mosquito could be seen as blade of grass when compared to a 1,000 old tree.

[Sculptor1]

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)

So it's more like Cherry-pick-ism. Or dodge-inconvenient problems-ism.
My reaction is that if a quark has "mind" then so too should the eiffle tower.
Still leaves the "How" questions open.
At least the materialism approach has some answers there.

[Sculptor1]

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.

You have just said everything is conscious. You cannot then deny equal status, since you have reduced everything to the same thing.

[Sculptor1]

As for talk of this sort of panpsychism and that sort of pan vitalism i have this to say:
There is fudge and then there is synthetic fudge sauce. You can also get re-constituted fudge based protein flavoured shake. Still all tastes like fudge. And BTW, none of these confections are moral agents.

My concern is that with eating, it may not merely involve transferring empirically comprehensible properties but also for a large part 'meaning'. When meaning would be erroneously neglected, it may cause longer term issues for prosperity.

Synthetic food could be seen as a form of incest...

It would be like feeding through the anus (an empirical retro-perspective as source for food).

You are having a laff mate

The real world is more complex than a dinner, and the human can overcome a lot, at least for a few hundred years. At question is simply what is best for long term prosperity (1,000 or 10,000 years, with the intent to 'start today in the best way' to achieve maximum advantage), and from that perspective I believe that synthetic biology / GMO could be disastrous for human evolution.

No one is ever going to give a mosquito moral status for any reason, but there is every reason to assess a mosquito's ability in the consciousness department as being greater than all plants of any kind.
If consciousness is the key to morality then plants do not have it.

I would not agree with this. While it is most wise to remove mosquito's from the human environment, so to enable humans to prosper, similar to that humans have driven tigers away from cities, that does not imply that mosquitoes are not to receive moral consideration.

There are some mosquitos that rely wholly on humanity.
THey do not offer us moral status so no they do not deserve it.

The bizarre and ecologically important hidden lives of mosquitoes
Mosquitoes have many functions in the ecosystem that are overlooked. Indiscriminate mass elimination of mosquitoes would impact everything from pollination to biomass transfer to food webs.
https://theconversation.com/the-bizarre ... oes-127599

Mosquitoes grow in swamps and are critical to the perpetuation of diverse microbes. Some (such as the agents of malaria, filariasis, and arboviruses as dengue) infect and burden human beings but there are also many good microbes.

6 great things microbes do for us
https://blog.ted.com/6-great-things-microbes-do-for-us/

Microbes outnumber human cells in individual humans. There are 10 times as many microbial cells in the human body as there are human cells. Without the microbes, the human could not live.

With regard to consciousness. When plants have conscious experience and when the neurons in their root system provide the basis for that, then, some big trees may have more neurons than a human brain, providing potential for an experience that is of a much higher level than that of a mosquito.

A mosquito could be seen as blade of grass when compared to a 1,000 old tree.

[Consul]

So it's more like Cherry-pick-ism. Or dodge-inconvenient problems-ism.
My reaction is that if a quark has "mind" then so too should the eiffle tower.

The panpsychists who don't take "pan-" literally would argue that macrominds "emerge" from collectives of particles with microminds only if the particles are structurally and functionally combined in the right way, which is not the case with the particles of which the Eiffel tower is composed; so the Eiffel tower (as a whole) is mindless.

Still leaves the "How" questions open.
At least the materialism approach has some answers there.

QUOTE>
"It is a striking fact that dualism, idealism, dual aspect theory, panpsychism, and physicalism offer no explanation of consciousness. They say only that consciousness is non-physical, or an aspect of something special, or distributed over all objects, or physical. But – odd though this may seem – these theories are beside the point, given that the point (for us at any rate) is to try to understand what it takes for something to be conscious. Physicalists as much as dualists and the rest still need to provide explanations and understanding. And while dualism, idealism, and panpsychism say only that mentality is a basic, brute, and inexplicable feature of the universe, physicalism – although it does not by itself provide an explanation – leaves scope for one; it doesn't just shut off the possibility."

(Kirk, Robert. Robots, Zombies and Us: Understanding Consciousness. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. p. 62)
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[Consul]

The panpsychists who don't take "pan-" literally would argue that macrominds "emerge" from collectives of particles with microminds only if the particles are structurally and functionally combined in the right way, which is not the case with the particles of which the Eiffel tower is composed; so the Eiffel tower (as a whole) is mindless.

See: Panpsychism > The Combination Problem

[Sculptor1]

So it's more like Cherry-pick-ism. Or dodge-inconvenient problems-ism.
My reaction is that if a quark has "mind" then so too should the eiffle tower.

The panpsychists who don't take "pan-" literally would argue that macrominds "emerge" from collectives of particles with microminds only if the particles are structurally and functionally combined in the right way, which is not the case with the particles of which the Eiffel tower is composed; so the Eiffel tower (as a whole) is mindless.

It's all a bit too convenient. I understand that similar codisils are invented for many other odd ideas such as astrology and flat earthism.

Still leaves the "How" questions open.
At least the materialism approach has some answers there.

QUOTE>
"It is a striking fact that dualism, idealism, dual aspect theory, panpsychism, and physicalism offer no explanation of consciousness. They say only that consciousness is non-physical, or an aspect of something special, or distributed over all objects, or physical. But – odd though this may seem – these theories are beside the point, given that the point (for us at any rate) is to try to understand what it takes for something to be conscious. Physicalists as much as dualists and the rest still need to provide explanations and understanding. And while dualism, idealism, and panpsychism say only that mentality is a basic, brute, and inexplicable feature of the universe, physicalism – although it does not by itself provide an explanation – leaves scope for one; it doesn't just shut off the possibility."

(Kirk, Robert. Robots, Zombies and Us: Understanding Consciousness. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. p. 62)
<QUOTE

[Consul]

…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.

"The word “panpsychism” literally means that everything has a mind. However, in contemporary debates it is generally understood as the view that mentality is fundamental and ubiquitous in the natural world. Thus, in conjunction with the widely held assumption (which will be reconsidered below) that fundamental things exist only at the micro-level, panpsychism entails that at least some kinds of micro-level entities have mentality, and that instances of those kinds are found in all things throughout the material universe. So whilst the panpsychist holds that mentality is distributed throughout the natural world—in the sense that all material objects have parts with mental properties—she needn’t hold that literally everything has a mind, e.g., she needn’t hold that a rock has mental properties (just that the rock’s fundamental parts do)."

Panpsychism: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/

I just noticed that the literal meaning of "pan-" can be saved by adopting this definition:

Panpsychism is the view that "all material objects have parts with mental properties."

Parthood is a reflexive relation in standard mereology, which means that everything is part of itself. And then the above definition doesn't exclude mereologically simple objects (e.g. simple elementary particles), i.e. ones which don't have any proper parts, i.e. parts which are not identical to the whole.
However, in ordinary language usage "part" means "proper part", so the following formulation can be used instead:

Panpsychism is the view that "all material objects either have mental properties or have (proper) parts with mental properties."

Since having a (proper) part with a mind isn't the same as and doesn't entail having a mind, the Eiffel tower can be mindless despite being fundamentally composed of millions of minded things.

[Consul]

Panpsychism is the view that "all material objects either have mental properties or have (proper) parts with mental properties."

I made a logical mistake, because the "or" should be inclusive rather than exclusive. It's incorrect to use "either…or" here, because if some material objects have both mental properties and parts with mental properties, this is certainly consistent with panpsychism:

Panpsychism is the view that all physical objects have mental properties or parts with mental properties (or both).

[Consul]

Panpsychism is the view that all physical objects have mental properties or parts with mental properties (or both).

Equivalent formulation:

Panpsychism is the view that no physical object has neither mental properties nor parts with mental properties.

[CIN]

QUOTE>
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)
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Obviously, so that the cannibals have something really nice to eat.

[CIN]

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

I'm afraid I'm not. I was trying to be amusing.

If you want my serious reply to OP's question, here it is:

I know that I am conscious.
I have pretty good grounds for thinking you are conscious, because consciousness seems to be a property of brains, and your brain seems to be very similar to mine.
I have slightly less good grounds for thinking my dog is conscious, because his brain isn't as similar to mine as yours is.
I don't have very good grounds for thinking birds, reptiles and fish are conscious, because their brains are less similar to mine than dogs'. And when it comes to insects, they're so different from me that I simply don't have a clue whether they are conscious.
The same goes for plants. If I had to bet, I'd bet that plants aren't conscious. But actually, I can have no idea whether they are, because the only kind of consciousness I know is my own, and that seems to be tied so closely to the particular kind of internal organisation that I possess that I'm all at sea when it comes to predicting whether something so differently organised from me as a plant is conscious.
Incidentally, the same problem is going to arise in the next few decades with robots. If we build robots that behave like us, will they be conscious? We will have no way of knowing, because their internal organisation will be quite different from ours. And so we will have no idea what we are morally allowed to do with them.
No, plants are not animals. Animals - at least mammals - are similar enough to us to possibly be conscious; plants are too different from us for us to know. This distinction is too important to be ignored.

[Sy Borg]

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.

Exactly right, Pattern Chaser. It's already long established that the OP's question is moot. I didn't reply to Sculptor's post because there was no actual content to reply to. Just fudge, really.

Some only see consciousness as akin to the human variety, only possible in brained species. That's been the standard view for centuries (at least). Only slowly, and relatively recently, have ANY other species been considered to be conscious at all.

A key problem with orthodoxy in this area is the deeming of non-conscious as "biological machines". This metaphor ostensibly appears to be grounded, it just black boxes critical aspects of organisms. It was a ridiculous claim when applied to chimps and dogs in the 19th century, and it's highly questionable today when applied to non-brained animals with complex lifestyles.

Either all life forms are biological machines or none are. No machine even comes close to the complexity and sensitivity of living things. What tends to be forgotten is how much pre-biologic evolution occurring before abiogenesis, as if it's a completely unrelated process. (That's the danger of chunking - losing the forest for the trees). It's yet another case of mistaking map and territory.

And, again, there are key questions that are yet to be answered.

1. The differences between LUCA and the complex "non-living" organics that directly preceded abiogenesis.

2. The subjective difference between the most complex non-brained organism and the first brained one.

[psyreporter]

I have pretty good grounds for thinking you are conscious, because consciousness seems to be a property of brains, and your brain seems to be very similar to mine.

The idea that (human) consciousness originates in the brain is not likely to be valid since there are humans who live a normal life (with job, marriage and children) with merely 5-10% brain tissue. A student with merely 5% brain tissue completed an academic degree in mathematics.

Consciousness without a brain?
https://onlinephilosophyclub.com/forums ... 12&t=16742

No, plants are not animals. Animals - at least mammals - are similar enough to us to possibly be conscious; plants are too different from us for us to know. This distinction is too important to be ignored.

It may be essential that humans will have been capable of discovering plant consciousness if it exists, to even consider forging a fruitful, i.e. friendly, relation with alien species, if the goal is to prevent survival to be subject to mere random chance or 'luck'.

[Consul]

Either all life forms are biological machines or none are. No machine even comes close to the complexity and sensitivity of living things.

QUOTE>
"The human body is a machine which winds itself up, a living picture of perpetual motion."
(p. 7)

"To be a machine and to feel, to think and to be able to distinguish right from wrong, like blue from yellow—in a word to be born with intelligence and a sure instinct for morality and to be only an animal—are thus things which are no more contradictory than to be an ape or a parrot and to be able to give oneself pleasure."
(p. 35)

(La Mettrie, Julien Offray de. "Machine Man." 1748. In Machine Man and Other Writings, translated and edited by Ann Thomson, 1-40. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.)
<QUOTE