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This a beautiful proof that atoms must be conscious, actually https://t.co/ujme1kQt9N
@eshear I don't think it is. This is just the sorites paradox in a fake moustache and trench coat, and sorites doesn't show that a single grain of sand is a heap, just that there can't be a sharp transition from non-heap to heap.
@eshear I'm sortof on team panpsychism anyway, but I think that a version of panpsychism that views atoms as conscious also has to acknowledge that consciousness isn't a binary property but a continuous one and atoms are barely conscious enough to matter.
@eshear I think it's not obviously correct to me tbh. I think it's both consistent with this argument and quite plausible that the smallest unit of consciousness is larger than an atom, but I'd want to pin down a lot more what we want consciousness to do for us to really care about it.
@eshear I'd bet that the term "conscious" is not sufficiently well operationalised to answer the question of whether an atom is conscious, and that different reasonable operationalisations of it will produce different answers to the question.
@eshear I do think any reasonable theory of consciousness has to admit consciousness as a continuous property with constituent parts that are conscious-but-not-very, I'm just agnostic as to whether atoms are large enough to have non-zero consciousness.